Compute Foundation Engineer

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. The Compute Foundation group builds core systems that enable Stripe engineers to ship code, configuration, and infrastructure changes safely and at high velocity. Embedded on the Imaging team, the role designs, builds, and distributes Linux machine images; manages host bootstrapping and OS-configuration systems; oversees OS packages and security-patching infrastructure; and provides platforms for service teams to run workloads across cloud providers and regions.

• Own the foundation of Stripe’s compute fleet, shaping its base operating system, package ecosystems, security posture, and bootstrap behavior.
• Lead architectural transformations, including modernizing the OS configuration layer, containerizing workloads, scaling machine image distribution across multi-cloud regions, and streamlining OS upgrades and security patching.
• Own the host lifecycle from image construction, package distribution, kernel and OS configuration, early boot/systemd, storage, and networking initialization through workload readiness.
• Design validation, canarying, rollout, health-evaluation, and rollback mechanisms to contain blast radius and make infrastructure changes safer.
• Lead large infrastructure projects from design through production launch, adoption, and ongoing operation; define architecture and success criteria, sequence work, resolve ambiguity, coordinate dependencies, and deliver measurable impact.
• Set technical direction for host infrastructure and machine image construction, validation, distribution, and operation; guide decisions about containerized and host-based workloads.
• Establish validation, staged rollout, observability, rollback capabilities, and guardrails; provide operators clear, actionable failure information.
• Lead incident response and reduce operational toil, prioritizing reliability, security, debuggability, and maintainability.
• Partner with infrastructure, security, compliance, and service-team leaders; align technical direction and lead cross-organizational work.
• Lead design reviews, establish infrastructure standards, mentor senior engineers, and improve designs and implementations through hands-on coding, code review, debugging, and operational leadership.

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience and a track record designing and shipping large-scale, complex production infrastructure systems.
• Ability to lead ambiguous infrastructure projects end-to-end, manage cross-team dependencies, and coordinate migrations across consuming teams.
• Deep Linux systems expertise, including boot and initialization, systems, processes, networking, filesystems, storage, packages, and production debugging.
• Strong cloud compute infrastructure foundations, including machine images, virtual machines, autoscaling fleets, launch configuration, block storage, IAM, health evaluation, and multi-region operation in AWS, Azure, or an equivalent environment.
• Experience designing or operating fleet-scale image, host-management, configuration-management, or infrastructure-provisioning systems.
• Experience with safe infrastructure rollouts, including automated validation, canarying, progressive rollout, health evaluation, rollback, and blast-radius containment.
• Service reliability and operational excellence experience, including incident response, reducing toil, and building reliable, debuggable, maintainable systems.
• Broad technical impact across multiple large systems, code review and mentorship, and ability to set technical direction.
• Preferred: experience with modern image-based, immutable, or declarative infrastructure platforms; containers, Kubernetes, and migration of VM-based workloads to managed platforms; operating large Linux fleets across AWS, Azure, or multiple regions; progressive delivery, automated validation, fleet health signals, and rollback systems; modernizing legacy configuration-management or host-provisioning systems; OS security patching, software supply-chain security, and artifact provenance; and building safe developer-platform abstractions and self-service workflows.