Senior Stripe engineers spotted leaving for Meta and Jane Street
At the intersection of finance and technology, it's not clear whether payments firm Stripe's technologists are valued more by peers in finance or in FAANG. Recent departures from the fintech are re-emerging at top firms on both sides of the aisle.
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Seattle-based Robert Waugh, one of just 13 level 6 staff engineers at Stripe, left the fintech this month after two years to become a principal engineer at Meta. He worked across the fintech's fraud, credit, financial crime and KYC divisions, with an emphasis on AI and LLMs. It's not clear exactly what his new role at Meta will be, but says he'll be "helping protect Meta customers from bad actors and bad things," so presumably a similar role to his previous one.
Waugh's role at Stripe was remote, but he doesn't specify whether he'll have the same arrangement at Meta. While Meta still employs some staff in a remote capacity, it has been pushing for employees to return to the office three-days per week. Reviews on Blind say that remote work options are "almost nonexistent for new roles." Almost.
Waugh is no stranger to the office though; prior to Stripe, Waugh spent five and a half years as an MD in investment banking, split between Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. He created the cloud center of excellence in the former, and was the engineering lead for management tools client engineering at the latter. Earlier in his career, he spent eight years working as a quant strat at Goldman and had a stint at Amazon Web Services.
Principal (L8) engineers at Meta are very well compensated. According to salaries on Levels.fyi since the start of 2024, the average pay for principal engineers is $2.8m.
Elsewhere, a Stripe engineer with no experience in traditional finance or Big Tech has just left for arguably the most coveted destination in finance for massive pay: Jane Street. Gregory Sherrid joined the electronic trading firm, which pays staff an average of $1.4m, last month as a software engineer in New York. He spent almost four years at Stripe, latterly becoming a technical lead for Stripe Billing's invoicing product.
Before Stripe, Sherrid was an education technology startup founder. He was CTO of Whooo's Reading, an AI platform designed to test the depth of knowledge students have of books, which he co-founded in 2013.
He's not the only Stripe alum to join Jane Street this month. Sam Sweeney also joined as a software engineer in New York; he joined Stripe just one month after Sherrid did, back in 2021. Unlike Sherrid, Sweeney has a strong Big Tech background with stints at both Google and Uber. He also spent a year at Aurelius, the hedge fund led by ex-Elliot portfolio manager Mark Brodsky.
Ironically, when comparing destinations, the Big Tech firm, Meta, looks more corporate than the finance firm. It recently conducted mass performance-based layoffs and shifted its culture to cosy up to the Republican government at the behest of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Jane Street, in contrast, has no CEO and minimal hierarchies as well as a penchant for being egalitarian with its pay. How the tables turn.
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