Stripe's founder reveals how much its $344k software engineers are really producing
Payments fintech Stripe has historically rewarded high performers handsomely, but how much do you have to produce to become one? Speaking at Stripe Tour London today, founder John Collison gave some insight into how prolific its engineering staff really are.
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Collison said in his opening keynote that Stripe averaged 1,145 pull requests (proposed changes to a codebase) per day in 2024, or 8,015 per week. Stripe's codebase is already massive, consisting of over 50 million lines of code, but the frequency of pull requests is lower than you might expect of a company the size of Stripe.
Stripe had ~8,570 employees at the start of 2025. Roughly 40% (~3,428) were engineers, equating to roughly 2.3 pull requests per engineer per week.
Engineering insights firm Haystack estimates that, on average, engineering teams make ~3.5 pull requests per employee per week, meaning Stripe's numbers look a bit below average. However, quantity can sometimes mess with quality. Elon Musk was criticized for using lines of code as a metric for laying off engineers at Twitter; opponents said it incentivized overwritten code without analyzing the actual impact of code written. Pull requests can also vary in size and impact.
Stripe goes to extreme lengths to ensure changes to code won't cause a crash, with more than six billion tests run on changes to Stripe code each day. A lot of unseen work can go into these larger pull requests.
Revenue per employee is an alternative performance metric used by fintechs, and Stripe also gave the impression that lean, high-performing teams are on the rise. Stripe's EMEA chief risk officer Conor McNamara followed Collison, and said that the top performing startups in 2024 had "high leverage per employee," noting that "large businesses can adopt this mindset too." His prime example was AI coding assistant startup Cursor, which has achieved an average revenue of $5m per employee at a headcount of just 60. Stripe hasn't disclosed its 2024 revenues yet, but it would have had to have made $42.9bn to match the revenue per employee of cursor.
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