Software Engineer, Secrets Infrastructure

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 infra...

We build foundational security infrastructure at scale: our certificate authority issues mTLS client certificate 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, an...

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

You'll be responsible for TLS identity and secrets infrastructure that every Stripe service depends on. You'll build infrastructure, developer tools, and guide partner teams on architecture decisions; we regularly need to help other teams reason about cryptographic primitives and PKI, transitive trust, potential failure modes and threat models. 
Since our infrastructure and libraries are used across the entire Stripe codebase, you'll work in Go, Java, Ruby, and Python. The services we own are written in Go, so most of your hands-on work will be in Go. The typical balance of hands-on work is about 60% coding, 20% infrastructure work, and 20% security design/guidance with partner teams.
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

We’re looking for a senior candidate who has enough prior experience in security, backend API development, and infrastructure to quickly take responsibility for significant projects. 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. 
5+ years of professional software development experience. Strong programming skills in Go, with significant experience in other similar system programming languages (C++, Rust, C#, etc) as a potential alternative.
3+ years of infrastructure and security experience (can overlap with other experience)
Experience in cryptography, PKI, secret management, or other security topics
Familiarity with infrastructure tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, and cloud platforms
Interest in security, infrastructure, and software development
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 verbal and written communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively with other engineers
Experience leading cross-team projects and building alignment on multi-team technical direction
Strong technical writing skills to write design documents
On-call experience
Prior experience building PKI or secret management infrastructure (as an SWE - not just provisioning a 3rd party tool or service)
Experience in Java, Ruby, or Python
Experience building developer tools, libraries, or platform services
Experience with kubernetes internals (how the platform works, not just as a user)
Experience operating complex services on AWS
Experience in fully remote work environments