Backend Engineer, Expansion

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 Web Presence and Platform is organized into two pillars, each of which is grouped into pods that focus on the central tenets of the Stripe public mission. The Presence pillar creates industry-leading designs for Stripe front door surfaces, educating customers about the power of our platform, sharing ideas and expertise with the public, and driving adoption. The Platform pillar builds the internal machinery that powers these surfaces, and is responsible for making our websites fast, stable, and easy to update. Together we design and build stripe.com and other sites that amount to what is, for many, their first impression of Stripe. As such, WPP offers exciting opportunities to have a major impact on Stripe success. We want to make every pixel count, we want it to be enthralling, and we want to help other Stripes seamlessly benefit from our systematic work. While the team's mission anchors to web surfaces, this role lives deeper in the stack. You'll be the engine behind the experiences rather than the pixel-level presentation—APIs, data pipelines, model orchestration, and service reliability that make LLM-driven user experiences possible at scale. What you'll do The Expansion pod brings creativity and executional rigor to attracting new prospects and driving conversion, focusing on user journeys, interactive and highly polished tools for users, and building targeted experiences for our global users. As a backend engineer, you'll architect and build the server-side systems and LLM orchestration layers that power intelligent, dynamic user experiences across acquisition journeys. You'll design the APIs, data pipelines, and inference infrastructure behind delightful and original interactive tools and resources that attract users. You'll collaborate deeply across design, engineering, and cross-functional teams and work across teams and tech stacks to create new site capabilities—with a specific focus on integrating large language models into production-grade services that are reliable, performant, and safe. This is not a research or ML training role. You'll be responsible for wiring LLMs into real user-facing products—managing prompt pipelines, handling model routing and fallback logic, and implementing guardrails and output validation. Responsibilities - Develop and implement the tooling and platforms to support interactive content tools (e.g., calculators, generators, templates) that provide utility to current and prospective businesses - Utilize a user-first mindset to implement feedback mechanisms for continuous improvement of content and product offerings - Design and build integrations to third-party software and create seamless workflows across these tools to unleash their full potential to the rest of Stripe - Ensure reliability, security, and responsible AI practices across all LLM-driven features, including implementing content filtering, PII handling, rate limiting, graceful degradation, and output guardrails - Work with a small team of technically sophisticated engineers who put users first 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. Minimum requirements - 5+ years of backend development experience, with emphasis on building APIs and services that power user-facing experiences - Experience writing clear, elegant code in a team environment - Familiarity with LLM APIs and concepts—prompt engineering, token management, embedding models, retrieval-augmented generation, or function calling. You don't need to be a researcher, but you understand how these models work well enough to build production systems around them. - Experience building and operating distributed backend systems—you're comfortable with service-oriented architectures, async processing, caching layers, and monitoring and alerting in production - Passion for engineering solutions focused around growth hacking and enablement - Excellent verbal and written communication Preferred qualifications - Proven ability to stitch different services and processes together even if you haven't worked with them before - Experience in developing interactive tools and integrating them with existing systems - Experience building highly complex interactive tools, including state management and data fetching - Experience with dat