Payment giant opens global engineering hub in Sydney
Multinational payments giant Stripe is increasing its recruitment of software engineers in Sydney, Australia, where it recently opened a new headquarters.
Karl Durrance, Stripe’s general manager for Australia and New Zealand, gave a handful of journalists a brief tour of the Sydney CBD office building, which has about 100 employees and is looking to hire more.
Those software engineers will work on Stripe’s core systems, Mr. Durrance said, adding that the Kent Street office is considered a global engineering hub for the $227 billion company.
“I think this was a really big moment,” he said.
“This is no longer a remote affairs office; this is now a core engineering office for Stripe, which I think reflects the availability of what is seen as a very strong talent pool here, as well as Stripe’s investment in the local economy, which we’re excited about,” he said.
Headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin, Stripe has approximately 8,500 employees worldwide.
Mr Durrance said the company had another office in Melbourne and a “developing office” in Auckland.
In 2025, the financial infrastructure company processed $2.7 trillion in transactions for five million businesses, including all the top AI companies and many of the largest blue chips.
In Australia, Stripe has over a million users, from “solopreneurs” who use Stripe to process payments for their side hustle to very large ASX-listed companies like Origin Energy, as well as streaming service Stan and AI start-ups Heidi and Lorikeet.
Mr. Durrance and Stripe executive Daniel Miller told reporters that Stripe was working with OpenAI to develop standards for “agent commerce” so that exchanges could one day be handled by artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT.
Currently, this includes a protocol for merchants and chatbots to share information, as well as secure payment that allows agents to initiate payments without revealing personally identifiable information.
Their vision is that a parent will eventually be able to tell their chatbot to do their back-to-school shopping, give it a budget, and trust that the agent will weigh the choices and make the purchase on their behalf.
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