Stripe Atlas: Guide to scaling engineering organizations

Stripe Atlas provides a comprehensive guide to scaling engineering organizations based on Stripe's own journey from startup to global payments infrastructure. The guide covers critical transitions including moving from generalists to specialists, evolving from informal to structured communication, shifting from consensus to delegated decision-making, and progressing from ad-hoc to systematic processes. Key frameworks include building effective hiring pipelines that maintain quality bar while scaling volume, implementing engineering levels and career ladders, creating sustainable on-call and incident response systems, and establishing technical decision-making processes that balance autonomy with alignment. Engineering leaders will learn how to navigate common scaling challenges like preserving culture during rapid growth, maintaining velocity as coordination complexity increases, preventing knowledge silos while enabling specialization, and evolving leadership structures from flat to hierarchical without losing agility. The guide emphasizes that successful scaling requires proactive changes before problems manifest, with specific triggers and thresholds for implementing new structures and processes.