Backend Engineer, AI Security

Location: New York, San Francisco, Seattle, or Remote (US/Canada)

Department: 8614 Office of the CISO & Partnership

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

AI is moving fast and Stripe is moving fast to adopt it. But we need to make sure we do all of this safely, and for most of these tools, enterprise-grade security isn't just available off the shelf. That's where the AI security team comes in—we're responsible for building and partnering to create the right security primitives to enable Stripe to move fast safely.

This is a team that works in the low-level components of our AI stack, so both infrastructure and security experience are pluses. This space is moving fast, so being comfortable with ambiguity and changes in priority is a must.

This is a foundational role—you'd be the first engineer on the team.

What you'll do

Engineers on this team do a mixture of partnering and advising with teams building AI infrastructure and products, and building security infrastructure primitives for AI.

One of our major focuses is building a security tooling layer that sits in the inference path, providing detection and protection against AI-specific threats like prompt injection, jailbreaks, and tool misuse.

Responsibilities

• Build security frameworks integrated with our core AI infrastructure

• Design and implement defenses against AI-specific threats like prompt injection and jailbreaks

• Collaborate with other engineering teams to ensure our AI infrastructure and products are built securely

• Support other engineering teams in integrating security primitives

• Uphold our high engineering standards and improve our codebase and processes

• Design and build systems that help define the state of the art for AI security

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 software development experience

• Experience independently designing and developing medium-to-large projects

• Experience working collaboratively across multiple engineering teams

• Experience writing high-quality code in a major programming language 

• Ability to drive clear next steps when working in an ambiguous environment

• Ability to think creatively and reason clearly in a complex problem domain

Preferred qualifications

• Experience developing, deploying, and maintaining reliable infrastructure systems

• Experience in security engineering

• Experience building AI agents or LLM-based systems