Local is key to global, according to Stripe’s methodology for growing engineering hubs.
Irish brothers John and Patrick Collison’s global e-payments platform Stripe is planning to grow its engineering team in Dublin tenfold.
In addition, the company has secured a crucial e-banking licence from Ireland’s Central Bank that will enable it to process pan-European payments following a hard or soft Brexit.
‘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’
– DAVID SINGLETON
Last week (21 March) the company tweeted that it planned to grow its global engineering hub in Dublin tenfold this year and the company’s global engineering team recently blogged about its well-thought-out methodology for growing engineering hubs with an emphasis on local hires.
Earning their Stripes
“We’ve learned that building a global company means building global products – and that those products improve even faster when they’re developed on the ground, closer to customers,” said global engineering team member Madison White.
“In five months, we’ve helped our first customers go live in Estonia, Poland, Greece, Lithuania and Latvia. We’re building products for Europe, and scoping our entry into the Middle East and Africa.
Our first global engineering hub will grow 10X this year. Here’s how it all got started, via @madisonsmumbles: https://t.co/ICzgWmVSgt
— Stripe (@stripe) March 21, 2019
Last year a Stripe landing team arrived in Dublin to establish its first engineering hub outside the US with the aim of adding new employees, or ‘Stripes’, in Ireland.
According to Stripe’s website there are currently 13 engineering roles available in Dublin, including roles in application security, back-end/API, privacy, test infrastructure, verifications, payments, infrastructure, integration and software.
In an interview with Siliconrepublic.com last year, Belfast native David Singleton, head of engineering at Stripe, said: “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. The first team that we are going to put in Dublin is actually the very core of Stripe – it is our payments product. The engineering team will focus on building core payments functionality for our user base globally but with a focus on Europe.”
This morning (28 March) The Irish Times was first to report that Stripe could potentially create hundreds of additional engineering jobs after securing an e-money licence from the Central Bank.
In recent weeks Stripe also revealed that the company is expanding into six new countries: Estonia, Poland, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia and Malaysia.
The move follows the company raising $100m in a funding round earlier this year that values it at more than $22bn. The new investment came from Tiger Global, which previously led a $245m funding round that valued Stripe at $20bn in September 2018. As well as Tiger Global, investors in Stripe include big names such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
The 45,000 sq ft The One Building, where Stripe’s Dublin offices are based, was designed by Irish architect Sam Stephenson.
Stripe was founded nine years ago when Patrick was 22 and John was 19. VMware co-founder and the former head of Google Cloud, Diane Greene, recently joined the board of Stripe.
Stripe’s technology allows websites and apps to quickly and smartly deploy payment options, negating the need for the sea of gateway providers, credit card processors, merchant acquirers, and specialised payments methods and wallets that vary in different markets around the world.
