scaling_engineering_orgs_polina_notes.md

scaling engineering orgs effectively

Raylene Yung, Head of Payments Engineering at Stripe

Beginning

• generalist API engineers, based in California
• solidly single threaded
• pairs of engineers would work on features, one at a time
• all engineers had access to all of the payment network info

Stripe Today

• live in 26 countries
• far beyond payment processing: invoice processing
• millions of sellers paid out using connect
• Stripe Terminal, Stripe Checkout, Stripe Issuing in parallel
• Currently redesigning our core data primitives in order to continue to expand globally

Infrastructure

• Dusty Burwell, Infrastructure at Stripe
• API spike when Kylie launched a flash lipstick sale on Instagram
• Sequins:
  • open source key value store
• Balancing Stability and Speed

Engineering principle at Stripe: Make small verifiable changes

Patterns to role out new changes quickly

• Feature Flags
• Scientist, for refactoring critical paths: https://github.com/github/scientist
• Ratchets
  • Static analysis tooling
  • Deprecate APIs and alert engineers using static analysis
  • Allows you to do small incremental changes
  • Nudge behavior of other teams
• Sorbet, optional type checker for Ruby
  • https://medium.com/byteconf/stripe-is-building-a-ruby-typechecker-d6cd7cee6abf
  • https://sorbet.run/
• Unattended deploys
  • Canary deploys / phased deployments with automatic rollbacks

Primitives & People

• Michael Schade, Head of Leverage Engineering at Stripe
• They don't automated support away
• In the early days they hired engineers for their support team
• "the ideal programming language is declarative"
• Ex. building up complex and reusable workflows within Stripe
• "If we can't keep up with all these tools, let's just create the tool builder"

Training new Engineers

• Tara Teich, Engineering manager
• Stripe used to be called /dev/payments
• How do they teach new Stripes

/dev/start Program

• 4 week program:
  • 4 week project, 3-5 engineers with dedicated mentor
  • full development cycle from design to deploy
  • build a community with your cohort
  • mentors got to be product managers and transferrable skills
• problems with this program:
  • mentors needed at least a year of tenure of stripe
  • needed to be able to coach and guide people
  • this approach isn't scalable
  • sourcing the appropriate projects became difficult, consistency is hard