This numerical study deals with the stiffened composite underwater vessel design. The structures under investigation are laminated cylinders with rigid end-closures and inter-nal circumferential and longitudinal unidirectional composite stiffeners. Structural buckling induced by the high external hydrostatic pressure is considered as the major failure risk. An optimization design tool has been developed to obtain the reinforcement definition which maximizes the limit of stability: an analytical model of cylindrical composite shell buckling has been coupled to a genetic algorithm procedure. The numerical optimization tests carried out corroborate design tendencies validated previously by experiments.