Specialist Solutions Architect, Payments
Application analysis
Specialist Solutions Architect, Payments at Stripe is a forward deployed payments infrastructure role for engineers who want customer-facing technical work with real deployment ownership.
Reading this role
This Solutions / Sales Engineering role centers on technical discovery, demos, POCs, and helping buyers build internal consensus. Key signals from the listing: Senior scope.
About Stripe
Stripe embeds engineers with large merchants to integrate payments, billing, and financial products. The role is anchored in NY, Chicago, so expect on-site customer work in that region.
Signals in the listing
Stand out for Specialist Solutions Architect, Payments
- Lead your application with one paragraph tying Specialist Solutions Architect, Payments to a specific customer or deployment you owned — Stripe hires for shipped outcomes, not tool lists.
- Bring a tight demo narrative: customer pain, live workflow, and measurable before/after — treat the interview like a compressed POC.
- Show how you qualify opportunities and say no to bad-fit pilots; Stripe values technical judgment in customer-facing roles.
- This role is tied to NY, Chicago — mention willingness to work on-site with customers and any existing ties to that market (clients, partners, or domain knowledge).
Stand out at Stripe
- Demonstrate API design taste with a concrete example — Stripe will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Demonstrate rigor with edge cases with a concrete example — Stripe will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Loops often include integration design and debugging — show you can reason about money movement, idempotency, and failure modes.
- Read recent engineering blog posts, product launches, and customer stories on stripe.com — reference one explicitly in your outreach to show genuine interest.
Tailored from this listing’s title, company, and description. Always verify requirements on the company careers page before applying.
Role description
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
Specialist Solutions Architects (SSA) are domain experts aligned to specific Stripe solutions and customer buying centers. We have in-depth knowledge of specific solution offerings and understanding of customer’s challenges. We advise the broader pre-sales team on complex opportunities, support pipeline development and revenue attainment, serve as an advisor on go-to-market sales plays, and provide critical insights to our product and engineering teams.
What you’ll do
You will collaborate closely with sales and pre-sales teams to drive pipeline and revenue targets, while also educating the product and engineering teams on market trends and strongly influencing the product roadmap. You will develop deep relationships with senior customer business leaders and grow Stripe’s solution offerings with new and existing customers. As a subject matter expert, you will scale the broader organization by creating reusable assets and coaching teams on complex, high-value opportunities. You will also run customer workshops and take the lead on key opportunities. The team is looking for a Payments and Money Movement industry specialist with a proven track record of designing and deploying financial architectures for B2B and B2C enterprises that deliver on key business outcomes. You will engage with Stripe’s customers as a thought leader in the Payments space to lead them through financial infrastructure transformations and maximize for things like authorization rates, simplicity, conversion rates, while reducing risk and fraud rates. You will extend your experience and expertise to customers to understand their existing architecture and lead them to redesign with Stripe and Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite and Link solutions, in order to achieve their business objectives. Your solutions and reference architectures will help customers strategically partner with Stripe to drive better conversion, higher revenue, and successful transformations. Your efforts as a Payments Specialist SA will have a direct impact on driving strategic, scalable engagements with the world’s most complex and innovative enterprises.
Responsibilities
Lead customer teams to visualize, strategize, prioritize, implement, and measure impact and growth with Stripe solutions Partner with customers to co-develop a strategy to embed our Payments capabilities and experiences throughout their platform for online and in-person payments, primarily focused on our Optimized Checkout Suite and Link solutions Work with business and technology leaders to understand the holistic business strategy and define solution specific architectures that offer opportunities to simplify the payments processes while also reducing costs and risks and improving authorization rates, and conversion rates Act as a technical consultant to customers to advise on financial architecture best practices that include Stripe as a key part of the solution architecture with the goal to help customers achieve high ROI on their investments Understand existing financial technologies and architecture for a customers through deep discovery workshops Be an advisor on change management efforts for product solutions and convey key messages to customers and stakeholders helping prioritize conflicting key performance indicators (timelines vs risk for example) Create architecture diagrams that can be shared with customers to drive key solution and implementation decisions that accelerate deals and activations Help Stripe capture additional market share by providing recommendations on Stripe product direction Uplevel the broader team by developing reusable assets such as scalable value drivers, end-to-end solutions, best practices, architecture guides. Keep abreast of new relevant technologies and industry knowledge, and showcase technical thought leadership through forums such as whitepapers, conferences, and industry events. Approximately 25% travel is anticipated to help you connect in-person in a meaningful way with users and collaborate internally
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
7+ years of experience working in payments, fintech, industry Knowledge of ISO payment standards Working knowledge of designing payment flows and architectures for large enterprises Experience with the different payment methods globally, including BNPLs, wallets, etc. Understanding of the impact of optimizing payment experiences for checkout conversion for merchants and ability to consult on the best design options for accepting payments Knowledge of integration of the payment hubs with core banking systems, fraud and risk systems, sanctions screening, and money movement rails Knowledge in one or more of the following areas: improving conversion, cost optimization, network compliance, processing reliability, cards feature expansion Experience with large global enterprise scale infrastructure that includes designing and implementing multi-party money movement platforms such as marketplaces Presents persuasively and authoritatively to peers and senior leadership, while facilitating collaborative conversation Experience in creating a strategic technology direction, aligning it with tactical activities, and communicating plans broadly across the organization Ability to communicate effectively across multiple audiences, including firm-wide business units, senior leaders, associates, and external vendors Ability to travel per business needs
Preferred
qualifications
Experience integrating Stripe or other RESTful APIs into web applications Experience with online and in-person payments, subscriptions, or other relevant concepts Experience as a subject matter expert in a relevant industry, vertical, or product