Stripe Stories: Fay Wu On Finding Mentors
In my first two weeks in my new role, I went through what we call Stripe 101 and /dev/start, spin-up programs designed to teach about Stripe's products and culture and get new Stripes started on a technical project. I also met my spin-up buddy, a fellow Stripe who checks in daily and helps set up a new hire for success. My buddy and I talked about everything from how to build a productive relationship with my manager to working with other teams. He turned out to be an incredibly thoughtful mentor and we continue to meet consistently to this day.
After getting up to speed on Stripe systems, current projects, and products (including Radar, the fraud detection product I'd be working on), I came back to the "what" of my career. What did I want to focus on? Frontend, backend, or all the layers in between? Did I want to solve problems for internal or external users? I was fortunate to have a engaged manager who helped guide me through these decisions. Another teammate encouraged me to turn to other engineers I interacted with on a daily basis, to observe what they do and how the various roles differ from each other. Stripe was at a size where there were a lot of amazing engineers working on fantastically different things, and pretty much everyone was willing to chat about why they loved what they were doing — and that part of Stripe engineering culture still holds true today. I started meeting with engineers on various teams to explore their broad range of perspectives. Some were motivated by getting deep into a particularly technical problem, while others were hyper-focused on user patterns and needs. And most, if not all, were personally invested in seeing my career progress, and encouraged me to explore all different parts of the tech stack.
A year and a half later, I've worked on fraud prevention, fraud resolution (in the form of disputes), and most recently was on the team that launched Stripe Terminal, our card present solution. I've owned an API, dealt with incidents, missed deadlines, and been a spin-up up buddy twice — with my mentors and managers positively supporting the ups and downs along the way.
Everywhere I look at Stripe I find interesting projects and teams. They inspire me to ask the tough questions, find better solutions, and challenge the typical way of doing things. Not only are they teaching me valuable technical skills, but I've been able to fine-tune what kind of mentor I aim to be.
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Stripe Stories: Meet Amber Feng
I wanted to work with people who were brilliant, and everyone was not only that (it was an impressive roster of folks who'd started or built previously successful businesses and products, built popular open source frameworks, and so on), but also the most down-to-earth and most humble people I'd ever met. Today, we're a team of over 450, but we've worked hard and preserved the same feeling: incredibly high-caliber and thoughtful teams, with a culture of transparency, humility, and respect.
Stripe is rapidly expanding in so many ways, and it's a really exciting place to be. We've been able to take on the projects we could only dream of as "wouldn't that be awesome to have someday" a few years back, like Atlas, and I can only imagine what we'll be able to accomplish as we continue to grow.
One of the things I'm most excited about is "leveling the playing field" for new businesses. The world is full of great ideas, and we've made it so much easier for anyone with a great idea to immediately start iterating and building a business–you shouldn't have to need deep partnerships or teams of people to build a unique payments model (an incumbent's advantage!). We're hoping this will only get easier with the infrastructure we'll be building to power businesses around the world. I'm looking forward to it!
