Specialist Solutions Architect, Payments

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.

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 a deep understanding of customer challenges. We align with specialist product sellers on deals, 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.

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 others on complex, high-value opportunities.The team is looking for a payments optimization specialist with a proven track record of designing and deploying payment infrastructure for global enterprises. You will engage with customers as a thought leader in the advanced payments stack - helping them navigate multi-PSP environments, payment orchestration, adaptive pricing, and buy-now-pay-later integrations to maximize authorization rates, reduce costs, and improve conversion at scale.

• Act as a subject matter expert on Stripe's Optimized Checkout Suite, Adaptive Pricing, Managed Payments, Orchestration, and BNPL integrations to accelerate opportunities globally
• Demonstrate a deep understanding of global payment optimization - including local acquiring, intelligent routing, dynamic currency conversion, and authorization improvement strategies
• Develop expertise in designing multi-PSP and payment orchestration architectures, including how Stripe integrates alongside or replaces incumbent processors
• Advise customers on BNPL strategy, including product selection, regulatory considerations, and integration patterns across checkout and billing flows
• Define, share, and learn best practices and reusable assets with the broader GTM organization to enhance the quality and efficiency of the team
• Create reference architectures that help customers design end-to-end payment infrastructure with Stripe at the core
• Partner closely with the Payments product sales team on Stripe's most complex OCS and Orchestration opportunities, leading solution strategy and owning key customer relationships
• Serve as a "Voice of the Customer" internally to drive product and feature request prioritization
• Identify and summarize trends in payment orchestration, cost optimization, and alternative payment methods, and provide actionable insights to product stakeholders and sales
• Act as an escalation point to drive complex technical issues to resolution with Stripe's engineering team
• Stay current on competitive analysis and market differentiation
• Support marketing events including executive briefings, conferences, user groups, and trade shows
• Approximately 25% travel is anticipated

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.

• 7+ years of experience in payments, fintech, or a closely related industry in a pre-sales, solutions architecture, or technical consulting role
• Strong working knowledge of global payment methods including cards, wallets, bank-based methods, and BNPLs - including regional preferences and regulatory context
• Experience designing payment optimization architectures for large enterprises, including multi-PSP environments and orchestration layers
• Knowledge of authorization rate improvement levers: local acquiring, network tokenization, 3DS, smart retries, and the technical and commercial tradeoffs between them
• Strong knowledge of software engineering and API integration patterns
• Exceptional communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills, comfortable explaining complex concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• A proven ability to build strong collaborative working relationships with business partners
• Ability to deal effectively with ambiguity and thrive in an unstructured, fast-moving environment

• Experience integrating Stripe or other RESTful payment APIs into web applications
• Knowledge of ISO payment standards and card network rules
• Experience with payment cost modeling, interchange optimization, or processor benchmarking
• Familiarity with marketplace and platform payment flows (Connect, multi-party transactions)
• Experience as a subject matter expert in a relevant industry, vertical, or product