The Difference Between Getting the Interview
and Getting Ignored? A Cover Letter.

Dear Hiring Manager,

When I came across Stripe's opening for a Senior Software Engineer, I immediately recognized the scale of the infrastructure challenges your payments platform faces daily — and how directly my background in distributed systems aligns with what your team needs.

Over the past five years at Plaid, I've built and maintained high-availability APIs processing over $2B in annual transaction volume. Most recently, I reduced our payment failure rate by 34% by redesigning our retry logic with exponential backoff, and cut p99 latency from 420ms to 180ms through strategic caching at the API gateway layer. I'm fluent in Go and TypeScript, and I've led migrations of legacy monoliths to microservices architecture for three teams.

Stripe's mission to increase the GDP of the internet is something I genuinely believe in. The way your team approaches developer experience — making complex financial infrastructure feel simple — is exactly the kind of challenge I want to work on. I've followed your engineering blog for years, and the recent post on your incremental migration to Sorbet reinforced that Stripe invests deeply in code quality and long-term maintainability.

I'd love to bring my experience in high-throughput financial systems to your team. I'm available for a call anytime this week — please feel free to reach out.

Best regards,