Collison brothers’ $9bn payments giant is bringing engineering home to Ireland.
Payments giant Stripe is to locate its first engineering office outside of San Francisco in the Silicon Docks area of Dublin to spearhead international development of its technology.
No precise number has been put on the number of roles that will be created but the engineering team is likely to grow to at least a “few dozen” engineers within the first few years, in addition to the 100 Stripe employees already based in Dublin. Globally, Stripe employs more than 900 people.
‘Given the heritage of our company – the founders being Irish – it means a lot to bring engineering, which is core at Stripe, back home to Ireland’
– DAVID SINGLETON
Stripe’s global head of engineering, David Singleton, a Belfast native who joined the company from Google, told Siliconrepublic.com that the Dublin engineering team will work on Payments, the core product of Stripe.
Founded by Patrick and John Collison, two brothers who grew up in Tipperary and who went to school in Limerick, Stripe is a global e-commerce platform that was valued at $9.2bn in 2016 when it raised $150m in a funding round.
Global payments vision
Singleton described the decision to locate a core engineering hub in Dublin as a major milestone in Stripe’s evolution as a global company. He said that the strategy is to achieve true product market fit in every market, and key to this is a globally distributed engineering team.
Dublin is already home to Stripe’s European headquarters, with around 100 people working at its offices near Silicon Docks.
Stripe is specifically looking to hire a European head of engineering to lead the team in Dublin, as well as engineering managers, backend/API engineers and full-stack engineers.
“We’re launching our first international engineering hub; it is the first engineering office outside of the US and it’s going to be in Dublin. Dublin is already home to our European headquarters and it is the centre from which we serve our growing user base from across Europe.
“We already have about 100 people working in our office in Dublin, and they work on things from user support, sales and operations. And, to start with in engineering, we’ll be adding a few dozen engineers over the next couple of years; and, given the heritage of our company – the founders being Irish – it means a lot to bring engineering, which is core at Stripe, back home to Ireland.
“We are just getting started, and we are optimistic that, in Dublin, we have access to really fantastic tech talent.
“The first team that we are going to put in Dublin will actually be at the very core of Stripe: our Payments product. The engineering team will focus on building core payments functionality for our use base globally but with a focus on Europe.
“Our focus on building tools for developers is what has made Stripe the go-to solution for accepting payments if you are growing an innovative technology business. And we’re excited that the Dublin team are going to work on features that will make that payments product even better and even more valuable for our users around the world.”
They earned their Stripes
From left: John and Patrick Collison. Image: Stripe
Stripe was founded eight years ago when Patrick was 22 and John was 19.
The company’s technology platform enables hundreds of thousands of businesses to securely accept payments and create new revenue streams.
When they were teenagers living in Limerick, the Collison brothers began a start-up called Shuppa in 2007 and it later became known as Auctomatic.
The company attracted funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Y Combinator, and was acquired just a year later by Canadian firm Live Current Media for $5m (€3.2m), when John and Patrick were just 17 and 19, respectively.
In 2015, Siliconrepublic.com reported that Stripe was expanding in Dublin.
The 45,000 sq ft The One Building, where Stripe’s Dublin offices are based, was designed by Irish architect Sam Stephenson and was recently redeveloped by Jones Investments, the company that redeveloped Dock Mill on Barrow Street, which was sold to Google.
Stripe is now one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the Silicon Valley scene and the company has received investment from major tech titans including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital, CapitalG, Visa and American Express, to name a few.
