Software Engineer, Secrets Infrastructure

Who we are

About Stripe

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies—from the world’s largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups—use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and we have a staggering amount of work ahead. That means you have an unprecedented opportunity to put the global economy within everyone’s reach while doing the most important work of your career.

About the team

The Secrets Infrastructure team provides the cryptographic identity and secrets management foundation for Stripe. We build and operate the internal certificate authority that authenticates every person and service at Stripe, and the secrets platform that manages everything from financial partner credentials to infrastructure access keys.

We build foundational security infrastructure at scale: our certificate authority issues identities for thousands of services and engineers, and our secrets platform and libraries protect access to critical financial systems and external partners across all of Stripe’s codebases, services, and platforms. The technical challenges include building systems with 99.99%+ availability, implementing workload identity for new platforms, and designing secret management tools that are both secure and user-friendly. Our infrastructure must be both reliable and developer-friendly—we maintain libraries in Go, Java, Ruby, and Python. As a small team responsible for critical systems, engineers take on meaningful ownership early and work alongside senior engineers who have deep expertise. Through collaboration with teams across Stripe, you'll develop a comprehensive understanding of how authentication and secrets management underpin distributed systems at scale.

Secrets Infrastructure is a fully remote team, with a small presence in the San Francisco and New York City offices. We pride ourselves on a friendly, technically rigorous, and supportive team culture.

What you’ll do

You'll contribute to critical infrastructure that every engineer and service at Stripe depends on. Your projects might include extending our certificate authority to support new types of workload identity, building features in our secrets platform that eliminate entire classes of security risks, or designing APIs that make secure practices the easiest path for developers. Each project offers the opportunity to see your work deployed across Stripe's entire infrastructure.

Working closely with senior engineers, you'll participate in the full engineering lifecycle: from initial design through implementation, testing, deployment, and long-term maintenance. All engineers on this team own projects from design through implementation, with support from senior engineers. You'll engage with teams across Stripe to understand their security infrastructure needs and help them adopt our solutions. As you grow in the role, you'll take on increasing ownership of components within our systems, contribute to technical strategy, and help shape how Stripe approaches authentication and secrets management.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement significant features in our certificate authority and secrets management systems
• Work across Go, Java, Ruby, and Python to implement authentication and secrets infrastructure used by every service at Stripe
• Work with with other engineering teams to understand their needs and design secrets and identity integrations
• Develop certificate provisioning and secret management integrations for various compute platforms (Kubernetes, EC2, developer workstations)
• Work on reliability improvements to maintain 99.99%+ availability for critical infrastructure; we take pride in making failure modes impossible instead of reacting to them
• Participate in on-call rotation for critical infrastructure, working alongside senior engineers to debug and resolve production issues

Who you are

We’re looking for someone who meets the minimum requirements to be considered for the role. If you meet these requirements, you are encouraged to apply. The preferred qualifications are a bonus, not a requirement. We’re looking for a relatively junior candidate who’s interested in growing in this role.

Minimum requirements

• 2+ years of professional software development experience. Strong programming skills in at least one of: Go, Java, Ruby, or Python. Strong experience in other similar system programming languages is a potential alternative.
• Interest in security, infrastructure, and software development
• Ability to work effectively with engineers across different teams and communicate technical concepts clearly
• Enthusiasm for learning new technologies and working across multiple programming languages
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills; the team maintains and troubleshoots integrations across all Stripe languages and infrastructure
• Clear communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively with other engineers
• Strong technical writing skills to write design documents

Preferred qualifications

• Prior experience with Go is helpful - the key services we run are in Go
• Experience with or coursework in cryptography, PKI, or other security topics
• Familiarity with infrastructure tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, or cloud platforms
• Experience building developer tools, libraries, or platform services
• Background in systems programming or infrastructure development
• Prior experience in fully remote work environments