David Singleton & Thomas Pamminger

Throwing off the burdens of scale in engineering

How does Stripe balance rapid iteration with over five nines of reliability? Learn the principles that drive their developer velocity and operational excellence at scale.

Throwing off the burdens of scale in engineering
#1about 3 minutes

Stripe's origin as a developer-centric payment API

Stripe was founded to solve the difficulty of moving money online by creating a simple, well-documented API for developers.

#2about 3 minutes

Evolving culture and product with global scale

As Stripe scaled globally and added new products, it maintained its user-centric culture by keeping teams small and focused on user feedback loops.

#3about 6 minutes

Balancing development speed with operational excellence

Stripe maintains high availability and rapid deployment through a culture of operational excellence, careful change management, and a sensible architecture.

#4about 4 minutes

Fostering user-centricity across all engineering roles

Every team member, including engineers, directly engages with users to gain a visceral understanding of their problems, using feedback loops like OODA.

#5about 2 minutes

Ensuring API quality and consistency through review

An internal API review group and the practice of "friction logging" ensure the API evolves deliberately while maintaining a high-quality developer experience.

#6about 3 minutes

Hiring and onboarding engineers for rapid impact

Stripe's hiring process seeks builders through realistic exercises like pair programming, followed by an onboarding that enables new engineers to deploy code within weeks.

#7about 2 minutes

The developer benefits of no-code and low-code tools

No-code and low-code products benefit developers by offloading complexity to hosted solutions that Stripe meticulously optimizes for performance and user experience.

#8about 3 minutes

Using generative AI to enhance developer productivity

Generative AI is used to improve developer productivity through tools like a conversational agent in documentation and GitHub Copilot for writing test code.

#9about 3 minutes

Stripe's future focus on the core development loop

The future of Stripe involves continuing its core development loop of listening to users and abstracting financial complexity for new waves of businesses.

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