So, as a member of the core team who these days spends most of my time working on recruiting, I can attest that the role you describe is very much not what we'r

So, as a member of the core team who these days spends most of my time working on recruiting, I can attest that the role you describe is very much not what we're hiring for. A recruiting engineer isn't necessarily someone who works only in the narrow recruiting box (our engineers get to work on the pieces of Stripe they prefer, but most of us have a primary focus). Instead, it's someone who is excited about solving recruiting, making it as efficient and effective as possible, and wants to spend a lot of their time doing so. There are a lot of problems in hiring that people have traditionally regarded as unsolveable, and try to solve by throwing more people at them. It's not just a matter of building a webapp to schedule candidates. It's about defining and tracking metrics around the effectiveness of our recruiting process. It's about building tools and platforms for identifying people we'd like to work with. (There are entire startups devoted to some of these challenges, cf Interviewstreet.) Anyway, I think that above all, anyone working in recruiting at Stripe needs to be part of the "core team". You're completely correct that someone working in recruiting who is not part of the core team just wouldn't work out well. But it's quite possible to be in this role and also be core.