Honestly, I almost didn't join. I had offers from bigger, more established companies. But during my Stripe interview, I talked to engineers who were genuinely excited about the problems they were solving. Not just technically interesting problems, but ones that mattered—helping businesses around the world get paid. That energy was contagious. Seven years later, the problems have only gotten more interesting.

First, find the problems nobody else wants to solve. Not because they're boring, but because they're hard and ambiguous. That's where you'll grow the fastest. Second, invest in your communication skills as much as your technical skills. At the Staff level, maybe 40% of my job is writing—design docs, strategy documents, persuasive emails. Finally, don't optimize for title progression. Optimize for learning and impact. The titles will follow.

I always start with the 'so what.' What's the business impact? What's the user experience change? Only then do I go into the technical details, and only as deep as needed. I also use a lot of analogies. Payments infrastructure is like plumbing—you only notice it when it doesn't work. That kind of framing helps people understand why we need to invest in things that might seem invisible.

Migrating our core payment processing system without any downtime. We handle billions of dollars, and even a few seconds of downtime can cost our merchants significantly. We spent months designing a gradual migration strategy, building extensive observability, and creating rollback mechanisms at every step. It was like changing the engine of a plane mid-flight. Incredibly stressful, but also the most rewarding project of my career.

The global expansion of digital payments. There are still billions of people without easy access to the financial system. As infrastructure improves and mobile penetration increases, we have an opportunity to democratize access to commerce. That's what gets me out of bed every morning—the idea that the systems we build can help a small business in Kenya or a freelancer in Brazil access the global economy.

That it's okay not to know things. Early in my career, I was afraid to ask questions because I thought it would make me look incompetent. Now I know that curiosity is a superpower. The best engineers I work with are constantly asking 'why' and 'what if.' They're not afraid to look silly in pursuit of understanding. That mindset has served me far better than any technical skill.