Building a virtual office that actually works
When Stripe launched its remote engineering hub last May, the goal was straightforward: hire 100 remote engineers over the course of a year. The company hit that number, and the effects have rippled far beyond the original scope. Permanently remote engineers have tripled and now make up 22% of the engineering population, and the number of remote employees across the company has tripled as well. With Stripe now fully remote during the COVID-19 pandemic, the infrastructure built for that initial hub has become the backbone of how the whole company operates.
Stripe has employed remote workers since its founding and began formally hiring remote engineers in 2013, but growth pushed the company toward a heavily office-centric model. Rebalancing that mix meant treating the remote hub as a first-class peer to the physical offices in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore—not as an afterthought. The lessons from that experiment are relevant for any company that started centralized and is now reconsidering distributed work.
Distributed teams build more local products
A major motivation for the remote hub was closing the distance between engineers and the global customer base they serve. When most engineers sat in two cities, building products that felt locally native to a worldwide user population was difficult. Now, two thirds of the Developer Support Engineering team operates outside a Stripe office, spread across three continents. The team divides into four coverage areas, each spanning roughly six time zones, which enables more timely, local support and lets the team run simultaneous, regionally appropriate customer events.
That proximity has changed product priorities. Stripe made substantial improvements to support non-card payment methods across its product suite. Internally, these were once called "alternative payment methods"—accurate from a San Francisco perspective, but not for many global users for whom credit cards are the actual alternative. Checkout now prioritizes payment method presentation based on the customer's location, and having engineers distributed in places like Singapore and Maryland has helped build that local intelligence naturally. One Checkout team member launched a local push payment method from Singapore; another shipped address collection from Maryland.
Managing the hub like any other office
The remote hub was stood up with the same standards and investments as Stripe's physical engineering hubs. A site lead—Aditya Mukerjee for the first year—owns the happiness and productivity of the hub. Leadership regularly joins via Zoom for discussions and Q&A. Virtual coffee chats are encouraged, and the team is surveyed regularly to surface both shared needs and hub-specific concerns.
That structure let Stripe run experiments on individual teams to figure out how to integrate remote engineers effectively, then scale the approaches that worked.
One remote engineer per team is a failure mode. A typical Stripe engineering team has five to eight people. When only one member is remote, that person carries a double burden: social and decision-making isolation, plus the unspoken job of rearchitecting team processes to be remote-friendly. Moving multiple remote engineers onto a team simultaneously has produced far better results for productivity and morale. It forces asynchronous communication, spreads the process burden, and accelerates adoption of norms that socially include everyone.
The invoices team for Stripe's billing product illustrates the shift. Previously based in San Francisco, it expanded to nine members across nine cities and two countries, with an engineering manager in North Carolina, three time zones from headquarters. The team now operates remote-first, even for its one headquarters-based engineer. Product and architectural decisions are documented in writing, code review SLAs account for time zone differences, and the team sets aside intentional time each week to connect. Recurring meetings are treated as scarce, sacred time—if there's no agenda, the meeting is canceled. Ad-hoc pairing and meetings are embraced for unblocking decisions and working through complex problems.
Cultural rituals have adapted too. Teams find ways to take breaks together: individual tea orders with photos posted to Slack, snack sessions over Zoom, unstructured hangouts, and parallel #TEAM-social channels so watercooler banter doesn't intrude on work channels. One team ran a simulated lunar crash exercise for bonding at a virtual offsite, ranking the tools needed to survive. There are no extraplanetary remotes yet.
Tooling and norms made onboarding better everywhere. Onboarding sets the tone for an employee's relationship with the company, and running cohorts of remote engineers forced Stripe to improve it for everyone. Tasks moved from synchronous batches to asynchronous formats—written documentation, videos, small groups sharing time zones—reducing ramp-up time and friction for remote employees while streamlining in-person onboarding.
More efficient onboarding lets teams scale faster and independently. Small teams in offices like Tokyo and larger teams in established hubs have grown, bringing locally relevant products to market. Engineers in Japan and Latin America recently collaborated to enhance local payment rails so users could receive funds in days rather than a month.
Investments in internal tooling and explicit communication norms have also paid off. Stripe built tooling to coordinate deploys for sensitive systems without synchronous in-person coordination, incident management tooling that rapidly spins up virtual response rooms, and scheduled written memos to replace daily in-person standups.
These preparations proved critical when Stripe closed all offices worldwide for COVID-19 while supporting users facing wildly different shocks—surge demand for delivery startups, cash-flow crunches and refund spikes for travel companies. A few years ago this would have been extremely difficult; it's still not easy. But the company continues to develop and ship products thanks in part to investments made to support a fraction of engineers.
Reaching candidates that office-centric hiring missed
Remote hiring has broadened the talent pool in ways that matter for the company's makeup. Engineers with family responsibilities often face hard choices between housing markets and career opportunities. When Stripe had few remote roles, it unwittingly narrowed that applicant pool and lost engineers whose partners' careers required moving away from office cities. Expanded remote capability lets the company attract and retain those engineers without forcing unpalatable tradeoffs.
The initial remote hiring push targeted engineers with significant remote experience, which naturally skewed toward more seasoned hires. But geography itself has diversified professional backgrounds. San Francisco engineers often come from startups and consumer Internet companies because those dominate the local employment base. Hiring in cities dominated by financial companies, larger enterprises, and agencies brings in different operational DNA and informs how Stripe builds products for adoption by those companies.
What started as a program for remote engineers, product managers, engineering managers, and technical program managers expanded quickly. Once roles could be done remotely, Stripes across the company began transitioning out of offices. Remote workers now span teams and seniority levels, including tenured leaders and engineering interns. This summer, Stripe is running an entirely remote intern program for 76 engineering interns. Hundreds of remote Stripes now work across engineering and business teams, and three out of four teams have at least one remote worker.
Remote work moves from experiment to strategy at Stripe
A year after launching its remote engineering hub, Stripe says the results have exceeded expectations. What began as a test has become a permanent part of the company's operating model, and leadership is now scaling up investment in remote hiring and infrastructure.
The shift is broad in scope. Stripe originally planned to hire remote engineers, engineering managers, and select technical non-engineering roles like product managers and designers. That list has expanded. The company now lists open remote positions across its design, legal, and marketing teams, with more remote-eligible functions expected as COVID-19 accelerates the transition.
Wider hiring geography
Stripe employees are currently based in more than 50 cities worldwide. The company can now hire remote workers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, the UK, and the U.S.
Expanding beyond that list is slower. Setting up remote hiring in countries where Stripe has no existing office presence requires navigating legal and logistical hurdles on a country-by-country basis, sometimes down to the neighborhood level. Tax regimes and people systems complicate the picture, and companies often need to run parallel hiring systems for on-site and remote employees.
One particular constraint: Stripe must be able to issue equity before making offers in a new jurisdiction, unlike other employee benefits that can be rolled out more gradually. The company says common standards across jurisdictions would help accelerate the broader shift to remote work.
Measuring remote employee experience
Stripe tracks remote employee satisfaction through bi-annual surveys. In the latest round, remote employees reported stronger team connections, better workload-life balance, and longer tenure than their non-remote counterparts. They scored lower, however, on whether the company fosters a sense of connection for employees in their specific location.
One notable improvement: 77% of remote employees said their location is not a barrier to having an impact at Stripe, up 10 percentage points from a year ago. The company's goal for the coming year is to ensure remote engineers experience the same level of impact, team connectedness, and career progression velocity as engineers working in an office.
