Staff Backend Engineer, Supportability Decisions

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 Supportability sits at the vital intersection of platform safety, regulatory trust and merchant growth. Our mission is to ensure legitimate businesses can seamlessly onboard and thrive on Stripe, while proactively safeguarding the financial ecosystem from bad actors and high-risk activity. The Supportability Decisions team is a newly forming pillar anchored in our Dublin office. In this role, you will be the foundational technical lead establishing this capability in Dublin. Our mission is to accelerate Stripe’s global expansion by building the canonical Supportability Decision Layer; a stateful distributed platform that provides unified, real-time, and explainable risk determinations to unlock fast, compliant merchant onboarding and payment method expansion worldwide. Doing this at scale requires solving high-stakes risk challenges with precision. Deceptive merchant activity, such as transaction laundering, introduces significant threats as bad actors actively adapt to mask illicit and unsupported activities behind legitimate storefronts. Rather than relying on rigid, fragmented controls that create unnecessary friction for good users, our team builds the intelligent decision systems that systematically separate legitimate businesses from adversarial behavior, enabling Stripe to grow safely and aggressively. What you’ll do As a Staff Backend Engineer and Technical Lead for Supportability Decisions, you will take ownership of defining and building this new space from the ground up. You will tackle high-ambiguity technical challenges in an adversarial threat landscape, turning broad risk policies and operational needs into resilient, high-throughput backend services and stateful decision engines. As the technical anchor in Dublin, you will set architectural patterns, mentor engineers as the team scales from its initial members to ~7 ICs, and drive technical alignment with distributed partner teams globally. Responsibilities • Lead the technical vision, system architecture and delivery of the canonical Supportability Decision Layer, establishing stateful, explainable decision APIs consumed across automated systems and human operations. • Architect decision aggregation and orchestration pipelines, synthesizing upstream evaluations (such as web-presence intelligence, backsite detection, and agentic assessments) into unified, low-latency determinations. • Design high-throughput, low-latency distributed backend services that balance platform safety, regulatory compliance, and minimal friction for legitimate merchants. • Navigate ambiguous, zero-to-one problem spaces to define clean domain models, contracts and interfaces across transaction laundering detection, web-presence screening and Local Payment Method (LPM) support. • Build resilient decision engines designed to withstand circumvention, ensuring systems maintain integrity against sophisticated bad actors who actively evolve their tactics. • Serve as the technical lead and mentor for the Dublin engineering team, setting architectural patterns, conducting design reviews, and raising the technical bar as the team expands. • Partner closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Risk Operations, and Data Science to translate strategic ri