Principal Engineer, Agentic Systems
About The Position
PayPal has been revolutionizing commerce globally for more than 25 years. Creating innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, PayPal empowers consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy. We operate a global, two-sided network at scale that connects hundreds of millions of merchants and consumers. We help merchants and consumers connect, transact, and complete payments, whether they are online or in person. PayPal is more than a connection to third-party payment networks. We provide proprietary payment solutions accepted by merchants that enable the completion of payments on our platform on behalf of our customers. We offer our customers the flexibility to use their accounts to purchase and receive payments for goods and services, as well as the ability to transfer and withdraw funds. We enable consumers to exchange funds more safely with merchants using a variety of funding sources, which may include a bank account, a PayPal or Venmo account balance, PayPal and Venmo branded credit products, a credit card, a debit card, certain cryptocurrencies, or other stored value products such as gift cards, and eligible credit card rewards. Our PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom products also make it safer and simpler for friends and family to transfer funds to each other. We offer merchants an end-to-end payments solution that provides authorization and settlement capabilities, as well as instant access to funds and payouts. We also help merchants connect with their customers, process exchanges and returns, and manage risk. We enable consumers to engage in cross-border shopping and merchants to extend their global reach while reducing the complexity and friction involved in enabling cross-border trade. Our beliefs are the foundation for how we conduct business every day. We live each day guided by our core values of Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, and Wellness. Together, our values ensure that we work together as one global team with our customers at the center of everything we do – and they push us to ensure we take care of ourselves, each other, and our communities. Job Summary: This job increases the effectiveness of software engineers, sets the technology roadmap, adapts roles to achieve technical goals, provides advice to senior executives, handles ambiguous situations, uses exploratory research for decisions, identifies improvement opportunities, mentors others, and enhances organizational performance.
Requirements
- 10+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
Nice To Haves
- 10+ years in software/ML engineering, with deep expertise in LLM-based agent systems
- Production experience building agentic platforms — multi-agent orchestration, tool-use frameworks, MCP/ACP protocols
- Strong systems design skills — you've built platforms that handle millions of requests with high reliability
- Experience with payment APIs, authentication flows , or financial transaction systems
- Familiarity with the emerging agent protocol landscape and LLM tool-use patterns at scale
- Published work, patents, or open-source contributions in agentic AI is a plus
Responsibilities
- Increases results & effectiveness of all software engineers in a large domain
- Sets the technology roadmap for a domain
- Adapts their role to the need, selecting the most effective means of realizing their technical goals
- Provides advice and counsel to senior executives within PayPal, influencing the development of multi-year business strategies
- Exercises wide latitude in determining objectives and approaches to assignments and takes initiative to achieve results
- Handles ambiguous and unfamiliar situations and uses creativity to deliver decisive resolutions
- Uses discovery & exploratory research, not being limited to technical domains, to make successful decisions
- Identifies themes & trends that span projects and teams, and finds broadly impactful opportunities for improvement
- Uses professional savvy to determine when industry-standard solutions can be adopted, versus when a problem space warrants a novel solution (“build/buy”)
- Mentor others as a means of propagating technical influence, and to enhance the performance of their organization
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
