Principal Software Engineer, SMB &FS

PayPal•San Jose, CA

About The Position

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. 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 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.

Requirements

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