Principal Software Engineer, SMB &FS

PayPal • San Jose, CA

3d • Hybrid

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: Own the technical vision and execution for platforms powering SMBs such as merchant payments, settlement & reconciliation, payouts, merchant services and developer experiences, capital/working‑capital lending, and embedded finance. Lead the multi‑year evolution from on‑prem to cloud‑native architectures. Architect AI‑native commerce capabilities—including agentic commerce (autonomous, tool‑using AI that reasons and acts across buyer–merchant journeys), real‑time risk/underwriting, and intelligent payment orchestration. Operate across org boundaries to set platform standards, influence executive strategy, and increase engineering leverage at scale.

Requirements

• Minimum of 15 years of relevant work experience and a Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

• Track record designing and shipping large‑scale, low‑latency distributed systems in payments/fintech or similarly regulated, high‑availability domains.
• Led cloud migrations of mission‑critical systems to cloud (GCP expertise a plus); depth in container orchestration, service mesh, infrastructure‑as‑code, and automated delivery.
• Hands‑on experience building and operating production AI/ML-powered capabilities for commerce.
• Deep understanding of the merchant payments stack: acquiring/facilitation, tokenization, checkout, authorization/capture, disputes/chargebacks, settlement & reconciliation, payouts.
• Strong security and compliance background (PCI DSS, SOC2, PSD2/SCA); experience architecting for auditability, explainability, and controls.
• Expertise in event‑driven architecture and data platforms (e.g., Kafka/Pub/Sub, stream processing, feature stores, real‑time analytics) supporting decisioning at scale.
• Exceptional written and verbal influence across org boundaries and up to C‑suite; crisp design docs and decision records that drive alignment.
• Proven mentorship of Staff/Principal engineers and effectiveness establishing technical standards and communities of practice.
• API platform experience (REST/gRPC/GraphQL), SDK/developer‑experience mindset, and a bias for cost‑aware, operable designs (FinOps).

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
• Own the multi‑year architecture and migration strategy moving SMB & FS platforms from on‑prem to cloud‑native; define milestones, re-architect for cloud-native, and land secure, compliant, highly available services.
• Define platform standards (APIs, contracts, versioning, idempotency, SLOs, operational readiness) that unify payments, risk, onboarding, settlement, reconciliation, payouts, and capital experiences.
• Partner with product, risk, compliance, data, and finance to align technical choices to business outcomes; translate complex trade‑offs into clear, executive-ready decisions.
• Grow Staff+ engineering capability: lead architecture reviews, create reusable frameworks and reference designs, and raise the quality bar across multiple teams.

Benefits

• At PayPal, we’re committed to building an equitable and inclusive global economy. And we can’t do this without our most important asset—you. 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.
• To learn more about our benefits please visit https://www.paypalbenefits.com.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal