Director, Software Engineering

PayPal • San Jose, CA

7d • $218,000 - $323,950 • Hybrid

About The Position

This role provides strategic leadership and direction for Venmo's data platform infrastructure and performance engineering organizations. The Director will lead multiple teams of engineering managers and individual contributors responsible for mission-critical databases, data pipelines, messaging systems, caching infrastructure, and performance engineering that powers Venmo's real-time payment processing at massive scale. This role requires deep technical expertise combined with business acumen to drive organizational strategy and influence company-wide technical decisions.

Requirements

• 10+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 2 years of experience leading others
• Minimum of 15+ years of professional experience in software engineering or data platform roles, with a bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years' experience building and running in production distributed large-scale systems in cloud. (AWS Preferred)
• 8+ years leading engineering teams focused on data platforms, distributed systems, or infrastructure
• 3+ years' experience managing engineering managers and leading organizations of 20+ engineers.
• Technical depth in multiple database paradigms (relational, NoSQL), distributed caching, and message queue architectures
• Proven track record delivering performance improvements and scalability enhancements for consumer-facing applications serving millions of users
• Experience navigating organizational transformation and managing teams through periods of rapid growth

Nice To Haves

• Background in financial technology, payments processing, or regulated industries
• History of supporting transaction processing systems requiring extreme reliability and millisecond-level response times
• Familiarity with resilience engineering practices, failure injection testing, and business continuity planning
• Knowledge of modern data pipeline frameworks and real-time analytics architectures
• Ability to build alignment across engineering, product, and business stakeholders on technical priorities and trade-offs
• Commitment to building diverse, inclusive teams and fostering psychological safety
• Strong communication skills for conveying complex technical concepts to varied audiences including executives

Responsibilities

• Directs and controls the delivery of business and technical outcomes that comprise multiple projects and operational activities within a domain through organizational and technical leadership
• Defines engineering health objectives that drive organization health, engineering best practices and operational targets
• Drives product and technical strategy with cross-functional leaders across the enterprise to deliver Domain goals
• Responsible for the delivery of programs, establishing annual organizational goals and ensuring performance and results that impact both their domain and potentially enterprise
• Develops engineering strategy that translates into operational and tactical plans; uses ground-breaking methods to think beyond existing solutions
• Sets the tri-annual roadmap for a domain level organization.
• Defines the operational strategy for a domain based on a defined budget
• Evaluates key business challenges and can complete complex, ambiguous initiatives having impact across engineering; directs the development of new or innovative solutions.
• Ability to deal with high levels of technical domain level ambiguity.
• Collaborates with direct team, managers in org, stakeholders, managers in other orgs, external partners and business stakeholders
• Set strategic direction and provide executive leadership for data infrastructure and performance engineering organizations supporting Venmo's transactional systems processing billions of payments annually.
• Drive multi-year technical roadmaps aligned with business objectives and lead organizational transformation initiatives.
• Define and communicate a multi-year vision and strategy for Venmo's data platform infrastructure and performance engineering capabilities.
• Lead organizational design and structure decisions to optimize for scale, efficiency, and business impact
• Set strategic direction for cloud-based data infrastructure on AWS, establishing architectural standards and best practices across Aurora MySQL, DocumentDB, DyanamoDB, Cassandra, Redis, and associated proxy technologies
• Define architectural vision and standards for messaging platforms (Kafka) and streaming data pipelines that deliver analytics insights to business stakeholders
• Establish organization-wide performance strategy and lead initiatives to eliminate bottlenecks across Venmo, ensuring systems can scale for 10X growth
• Oversee chaos engineering programs and enterprise-wide capacity planning processes to validate infrastructure readiness for major events including holidays, promotional campaigns, and high-transaction volume periods
• Drive technical debt reduction and platform modernization initiatives with measurable business outcomes
• Collaborate with product management, security, compliance, and business operations teams to ensure technical solutions meet both functional requirements and regulatory obligations
• Develop engineering talent through mentorship, coaching, and creating opportunities for technical growth and leadership development
• Own budget planning, financial forecasting, and resource management to deliver maximum value within allocated investments
• Establish operational excellence practices including monitoring, alerting, incident response, and post-incident analysis to continuously improve system reliability and achieve 99.999%+ uptime targets

Benefits

• This role is also eligible for a range of benefits which may include, medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance, parental and family leave, 401(k) savings plan, paid time off, and other benefits.
• At PayPal, we’re committed to building an equitable and inclusive global economy.
• That’s why we offer benefits to help you thrive in every stage of life.
• We champion your financial, physical, and mental health by offering valuable benefits and resources to help you care for the whole you.
• We have great benefits including a flexible work environment, employee shares options, health and life insurance and more.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees