High School Internship, Software Engineering (Summer 2027)

Skills this role screens for

About the role

This role is intended for current high school students graduating in 2027 or later.

The company

Who we are

About Stripe

Stripe is a technology company focused on improving the conditions for economic growth and prosperity. We build programmable financial infrastructure, rethinking from first principles how financial services should work, to make it easier and cheaper for any business to start and scale. More than 10 million businesses build on Stripe, spanning the economic frontier, from solo founders to established enterprises, united by a practical focus on growth. The most ambitious companies in the world use Stripe as core infrastructure to grow faster. They process trillions of dollars a year on Stripe, equivalent to around 1.6% of global GDP. While economic growth makes everyone better off, open markets also enable greater variety. When any business can easily serve a global customer base, the quality and diversity of products in the world increase, and craft and creativity are unleashed into the smallest niches.

Our own growth is wholly contingent on the success of the businesses building on Stripe. We therefore invest back into our technology at an unusual rate. We make upgrades to our products every single day to deliver compounding gains to our customers. We maintain some of the most reliable APIs on the internet. We build entirely new pieces of financial infrastructure to enable new ideas. And our significant advances in risk and fraud infrastructure over many years are making the internet economy safer and more accessible.

Though people at Stripe do not tend to take themselves seriously, Stripe is a fairly serious place: our customers are depending on us for their livelihoods. We admire ambition, intensity, curiosity, humility, and rigor. The most effective people become knowledgeable about many domains besides their own. Any company is an applied exercise in understanding some aspect of society or the market. In working with so many, especially the new and innovative ones, we think that Stripe is one of the very best places to learn about how the world works.

The work

What you’ll do

This is a small, selective internship for exceptional high school students and recent graduates whose technical work already stands out well beyond what we typically see at this stage. We are not looking for potential or credentials alone. We are looking for students who can show, through what they have built, researched, or contributed, that they are ready to do substantive engineering work with a Stripe team.

You will spend 12 consecutive weeks between May and August working in person from Stripe’s San Francisco or Seattle office on a scoped engineering project. You will own a problem end to end with support from your manager and teammates, contribute to Stripe’s codebase, and learn how engineers build reliable systems used by millions of businesses. Recent Stripe intern projects include expanding Payments Foundation Model capabilities to improve generalized anomaly detection, building more approachable fraud controls, creating safer payouts, and developing user-facing solutions that prevent costly pricing mistakes and make merchant checkout setup easier.

You will work alongside Stripe’s collegiate interns and full-time employees. That means participating in the same team environment, learning how engineers at different stages approach technical decisions, and building relationships across the broader Stripe community.

This is not a trainee or classroom-based program. You will receive support from your manager and teammates, but you will be expected to contribute to your team’s work, learn quickly, communicate clearly, ask strong questions, and produce work that holds up under technical review.

As with Stripe’s collegiate internships, strong performance may lead to consideration for future opportunities at Stripe, including full-time employment for interns who meet the relevant eligibility and hiring requirements. Future opportunities are not guaranteed and will depend on individual performance and Stripe’s hiring needs.

The work

Responsibilities

What We Look For

We don't have a test score threshold. We look for people who have already started acting like the engineers and operators we most admire.

• Participate fully in the team you join, including team discussions, decisions, and the technical design process.
• Write, test, and document software intended for production use by Stripe teams and users.
• Give and receive technical feedback through code reviews and design discussions.
• Collaborate with engineers and cross-functional partners to seek and incorporate feedback.
• Learn unfamiliar systems through independent research and close work with your manager, mentor, teammates, and subject matter experts.
• Communicate the status of your work clearly, including progress, risks, open questions, and where you need help.
• Use current AI development tools thoughtfully while applying rigorous judgment to review, refine, test, and validate outputs.
• Ambitious builder: You are energized by building solutions without a clear precedent and working through difficult technical problems. You can point to technical work that shows unusual initiative, depth, or originality for someone at your stage.
• Rigorous thinker: You care about whether your work is correct, not just whether it runs. You test your assumptions, examine edge cases, and can explain the choices you made.
• Adaptable problem solver: You learn quickly, respond well to feedback, and keep making progress when the path is unclear.
• Collaborative teammate: You communicate clearly, treat others with kindness, and know when to work independently and when to ask for help.

Who they want

Minimum requirements

• Currently enrolled in high school, or graduating from high school before the internship begins.
• Available to work full-time and in person from Stripe’s San Francisco or Seattle office for 12 consecutive weeks during a mutually agreed period between May and August 2027. We cannot accommodate remote participation, a shorter internship, or breaks within the 12-week period.
• Experience programming through independent projects, research, coursework, competitions, open source contributions, a startup, or another setting. We work mostly in Ruby, Java, JavaScript, Go, and Scala. We believe new programming languages can be learned when the fundamentals are strong.
• Evidence of exceptional technical achievement for your stage. This could include a product or system you built, a substantial open source contribution, original research, meaningful work at a startup, advanced competition performance, or another body of work that demonstrates comparable depth and ownership.
• Ability to explain your individual contribution to the work you submit, including the problem, technical decisions, tradeoffs, testing, feedback, and what you would improve.
• Experience working with others on a technical project and incorporating feedback from peers, mentors, teachers, users, or collaborators.
• Ability to learn unfamiliar systems through independent research and work with a mentor or subject matter expert.
• Clear written and verbal communication.
• Ability to meet the employment eligibility, minimum age, and documentation requirements for the role’s location by the internship start date. Final contract language is subject to Legal review.

Nice to have

Preferred qualifications

• One or more areas of deeper technical knowledge, such as frontend, backend, infrastructure, data, machine learning, security, or developer tools, balanced with strong general programming fundamentals.
• Experience writing high-quality pull requests, tests, technical documentation, or design notes.
• Familiarity navigating an unfamiliar codebase or contributing to a multi-person project.
• A record of sustained technical work over time, not only one-time awards or credentials.…