How four engineers are building their careers at Stripe

The right internship or first job after graduation can set the tone for the rest of your career. Ideally, it will give you lots of ways to learn, grow, meet mentors and friends, and make a real impact early in your tenure. One way to meet those goals is to intern or work at an evolving company, where you’ll have the chance to shift roles, contribute to a range of projects, connect across continents, and explore what lights you up at work.

At a fast-moving company like Stripe, the biggest challenge is often identifying just which opportunities are right for you. In this post, we’ll meet four Stripes who joined as interns or recent graduates and who have made the most of their roles, no matter their team, region, or experience level. 

Read on to learn more about how each Stripe is building their career and navigating change in an ambitious environment that’s scaling fast.

The new grad experience: Abraham Odukoya

Abraham Odukoya—a Dublin, Ireland, native—graduated with a master’s degree in computer science from Trinity College in 2021. He completed a few software engineering internships while studying, but for his first full-time job, he chose Stripe. Joining a fast-moving company with founders from his home country, and a mission he could get behind, was appealing.

“This was during the pandemic, and Stripe’s whole thing is, ‘We’ll make it really easy for you to buy stuff online,’” Abraham says. “Given the climate in the world—the fact that everyone had to stay home, they had to get all their groceries online, do all their shopping online—the fact that Stripe’s core offering is actually helping people was another reason why I wanted to work here.”

When Abraham joined the EMEA Payments-Redirects team as a software engineer in September 2021, he immediately benefited from mentorship and social connections fostered by a warm company culture. During three weeks of onboarding, he was paired with a spin-up buddy with whom he met weekly and who supported him as he completed his first standalone projects as part of the /dev/start program. He found that others besides his assigned spin-up buddy were there for him, too.

“You can go to pretty much anyone with any question. No one has ever been, like, ‘I don’t have time for this,’” he says. “Being able to lean on my teammates and even people outside of the team so much was great. No one condescended to me because I was a new grad.”

Since September, Abraham says he’s seen his team nearly double in size, which has created both challenges and opportunities, especially as a new employee. Stripe’s reputation for extensive documentation has been helpful, he says, but at first it was overwhelming.

“There’s so much documentation, the codebase is so huge, there’s so many different products, there’s so many things going on, that it can be quite a challenge to get your head around,” he says. But with growth has also come strength and a sense of balance on his team. 

“Now, seeing the team grow, it feels like it’s a lot more stable because we have more support,” Abraham says. That means they can spend time not only building products, but also improving internal tech infrastructure.

While Abraham joined Stripe as a full-time remote worker due to the pandemic, a humble, welcoming culture allowed him to connect with colleagues from the beginning. Affinity groups for Stripes and allies of different backgrounds and gender identities, such as The Black Stripes, Equate, and Unidos, promote inclusion and social ties across regions, he says. 

“They help foster a sense of belonging amongst people,” Abraham says. “That’s a good way to keep a culture where everyone feels supported and can ask questions.”

From intern to intern manager: Julius Putra Tanu Setiaji

Julius Putra Tanu Setiaji was twice a software engineering intern at Stripe during his summer breaks from the National University of Singapore in 2019 and 2020. He discovered the internship when he attended an engineering open house hosted by Stripe, which was building its presence in Singapore at the time. He was impressed by the technical talks at the open house, but especially by the company’s focus on documentation.

At Stripe, “documentation lives side by side with code,” Julius says. “It’s really, really slick. It relates back to how Stripe makes its API really easy to integrate.”

When he started his first internship, like other interns, Julius worked on a real-world project for 12 weeks, including building a prototype integration with a bank in Indonesia. As part of the project, he spoke with stakeholders and potential users and led the development of a design document. One challenge was learning how and where to get help when he couldn’t move forward on his own. His manager encouraged him to ask other Stripes questions on Slack or to drop questions into public channels without fear. 

“It is intimidating at first, but you eventually learn who is the appropriate person to ask,” he says. “That helps in unblocking yourself.”

He also found it useful to talk to senior engineers other than his manager during the internship and to gather feedback throughout. 

“The way the internship is structured is very useful in terms of that,” he says. He received a lot of guidance and feedback at every point in his internship journey, in addition to the formal feedback he got during his midpoint and final performance reviews.

Julius joined Stripe full-time in February 2021 as a software engineer on the APAC Money Movement team, and recently also volunteered to become an intern manager. In this role, he manages interns during a 12-week cycle, which takes up about two-thirds of his time at the start of the cycle and a quarter or a third of his time as the interns get up to speed. He says one of the most valuable changes in moving from individual contributor to manager is his new insight into the performance review process. 

“My manager is helping a lot with that, making sure I’m writing clearly and giving constructive feedback,” he says.

He’s also noticed ways that contributing as a full-time engineer is different from his two internships. There were few significant blockers to the success of his projects during the 12-week internships, since it’s a short cycle overseen by managers. But it’s a different story as an employee.

“As a full-time engineer, that’s one of the hurdles that you have to overcome: manage timelines much more, and project management plays a bigger role,” he says. 

Building this level of efficiency and coordination has been one of the most fulfilling parts of working at Stripe full-time, Julius says. He’s been able to focus on questions like, “How do you create a solution to a problem? ” he says. 

Seizing a leadership opportunity: Kimberly Hou

Kimberly Hou joined Stripe as a full-time software engineer in March 2018 after completing her master’s degree at Columbia University. From early on, she shared with each of her managers that she’d one day like to take on a leadership role.

“Even starting with my first manager, they knew that a long-term goal of mine—no timeline in mind—was to transition into engineering management,” she says. “I felt naturally drawn to advocating for and helping others with their career journey.”

In her first four years as an individual contributor, Kimberly grew not only as an engineer, but as a future leader. She developed both formal and informal mentorship relationships with senior Stripes within and outside her team. She participated in a mentorship program within the engineering org, and due to her interest in moving into management in the future, she was paired with a leader in another part of the company. As a mentor/mentee pair, they met for an hour once every few weeks for six months.

“Those conversations opened my eyes to so many facets of management, leadership, and building a team,” she says.

In February 2022, Kimberly took on her first engineering management role on the Financial Accounts team. One manager had asked in a 1:1 if Kimberly would be ready to make the move due to her long-standing interest in leadership and the new opportunities that natural growth within the company had made available. She’s now learning how to manage in a rapidly scaling environment as Stripe’s second decade unfolds.

“The shapes of projects that we’re working on as a company include massive redesigning, revamping of our data models, of our primitives, even of our APIs, to help usher in a much more granular and expressive framework and platform for all of our users, no matter the product,” she says. More complexity beyond Stripe’s initial focus on payments processing brings with it more complexity for engineering managers, too.

“That means needing to be comfortable with ever-growing, ever-ambiguous problem spaces that will also involve more people, more stakeholders across all kinds of functions compared to the scope that a lot of previous projects used to require,” she says.

Kimberly has kept in contact with previous managers who are now members of other teams, or who have moved on from Stripe, and says she feels inspired by their trajectories and by how much she learned from them. 

“When I look back, not just my teammates, or a small handful of people, but countless people over the span of years I can individually think of and thank for shaping me fundamentally into the software engineer that I am today,” she says. 

Her advice for new grads just joining Stripe? 

“Meet as many people as possible early on, even if it's easy to get caught up in the business of things,” she says. That’s especially true in the first six to 12 months at the company, when there may be more time to devote to learning about your role and colleagues. Early on, for example, Kimberly participated in Stripe’s lunch buddy program, and she made a range of friends in other functions, roles, and organizations.

“That collectively got me much more excited about the work I'm doing, the impact my team is helping bring, and where we all fit in the context of the company's mission,” she says.

Finding adventure in new roles: Fidel Salgado

Almost five years into his tenure at Stripe, Fidel Salgado has had the opportunity not just to join new teams and lead new projects, but to open up an entirely new Stripe office. He started out as an intern at Stripe after completing his bachelor’s degree in computer science at Stanford in 2017, and took on a full-time role at Stripe in January 2018. 

“As an intern, I was handed tasks that I think someone as a full-time engineer would have done anyway,” he says. “I felt like I was really part of the team.” 

He continued to work on the same team as a full-time engineer, and his experience diving into Stripe’s already large codebase stayed with him.

“That's a great skill, not being intimidated and being comfortable navigating any kind of codebase that you’re unfamiliar with,” he says. “It's something that has really helped me be autonomous and independent and able to make progress quickly.”

For a year and a half, he worked as a software engineer on the Ledger team in San Francisco. Then, for eight months from 2019 to 2020, he lived in Mexico City to build up Stripe’s presence there. That meant moving to the Global Latin America (LATAM) team to help open up the Mexico City office and improve Stripe’s products in Latin America. 

“It seemed like a great opportunity to go to an entirely new place and grow in some areas outside of pure engineering,” he says. He also had the opportunity to interview a lot of candidates for new positions at Stripe. "I got to grow as a sourcer and [as] somewhat of a recruiter.”

Fidel’s experience also included setting the foundation for a new operational location, which meant “being more deliberate about the type of culture you want to set in that physical office,” he says. “As we had visitors and as we had new hires, what type of norms do we want to have in the office?”

Fidel’s transition from the Ledger team to LATAM meant an increase in responsibility, including leading the development of the Boleto payment method in Brazil. 

“We were growing very, very rapidly, so there were a lot of new engineers joining the team,” he says. “I was not only responsible for how we were going to land this payment method, what are the milestones we need to build, but also finding new opportunities for these new engineers to take on and to grow.”

That’s something Fidel has observed as a unique feature of high-growth companies: “You get to be a leader as you’re more tenured very quickly,” he says.

When the pandemic required Fidel to return to San Francisco, he stayed on the LATAM team until recently, when he transitioned to the Payment Methods Management team. He says that the company encourages engineers to try out new roles and new learning opportunities.

For interns and new grads at the start of their careers, Fidel recommends pushing to understand the “why” of what you’re doing at Stripe.

“If I had to go back,” he says, “I wish I would have a little bit sooner figured out, ‘Why am I getting assigned these tasks?’—learning from the more tenured engineers why we’re working on them, and getting better sooner at finding tasks for yourself.” That can build your readiness to take on a leadership role on your team or at the company, or to be considered for exciting new projects.

“That's one of the most valuable things that as you grow as an engineer you can provide to the team: not only executing and doing tasks, but helping the team figure out what we need to work on next,” Fidel says.

Life at Stripe

When you join Stripe as an intern or recent graduate, the possibilities are as vast and varied as you make them. Check out what we offer to interns and new grads and our current open roles to learn more about starting your career at Stripe. 

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