Stripe's API design: past, present, and future

Engineering lead Alex Lusco from Stripe's API platform team explains how Stripe maintains five nines of reliability and the engineering principles behind one of the most praised APIs in the developer community. We dive deep into why Stripe built API v2, how it differs from v1, and what the future holds for agentic AI interactions with Stripe's platform. Alex also shares key principles that startups can learn from Stripe's approach to building developer-first products. 00:00 Introduction 01:31 Achieving five nines reliability under the hood 03:09 Understanding five nines: 5 minutes downtime per year 04:08 Why Stripe built API v2 06:46 How accounts v2 helps developers 08:11 Improved idempotency in API v2 10:19 Global architecture and performance optimizations 12:07 Microservices architecture in API v2 13:49 Why customers should migrate to v2 14:17 Principles for startups 16:27 Being meticulous and user-first 17:53 AI and agentic interactions with Stripe 19:11 The future of Stripe's MCP integration 22:40 From IDE to production with AI agents 24:49 Where to learn more about API v2