Software Engineer, Backend
PayPal•San Jose, CA
•Hybrid
About The Position
As a Software Engineer, you will design, build, and maintain high-throughput, fault-tolerant services that process billions of payment transactions annually. You will partner closely with product managers, architects, and peer engineers to deliver reliable, scalable features that directly impact PayPal's global payments platform. This role is ideal for engineers who have a strong foundation in Java backend development and are ready to take greater ownership of complex technical challenges, mentor junior engineers, and influence team-level technical decisions.
Requirements
- 1+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
- 3–6 years of hands-on professional software engineering experience
- Strong proficiency in Java (Java 11+); deep understanding of JVM, concurrency, and memory management
- Experience building and deploying RESTful microservices in distributed systems
- Solid understanding of SQL and NoSQL databases (MySQL, Oracle, Cassandra, Redis)
- Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions) and DevOps practices
- Strong command of data structures, algorithms, and system design principles
- Demonstrated ability to own features end-to-end — design through production
Nice To Haves
- Experience with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, or similar enterprise Java frameworks
- Hands-on experience with message queues and event-driven architectures (Kafka, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ)
- Knowledge of financial systems, payment processing, or fintech domain
- Experience with cloud platforms — AWS, GCP, or Azure
- Familiarity with service mesh, API gateways, and security patterns (OAuth2, JWT, TLS)
- Contributions to open source projects or published technical writing
- Experience working in an Agile/Scrum environment at scale
Responsibilities
- Implements tasks within the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), receiving structure and oversight from more experienced staff
- Follows well-established internal conventions and standard procedures
- Understands internal standards & processes an applies them to make technical decisions
- Collaborates with peers, manager, and project lead to gain understanding of tasks and review solutions
- May contribute to code & design reviews
- Design, develop, and own microservices and RESTful APIs powering PayPal's core payment flows
- Write clean, testable, and maintainable Java code aligned to team standards and best practices
- Participate in and lead design reviews, code reviews, and architecture discussions
- Contribute to technical roadmap planning and sprint execution with a focus on delivery quality
- Ensure services meet high availability, low-latency, and scalability SLAs at global scale
- Instrument services with observability tooling (metrics, logging, distributed tracing)
- Participate in on-call rotations and drive incident response, RCA, and remediation
- Collaborate cross-functionally with product, security, QA, and platform engineering teams
- Mentor and guide CL3/CL4 engineers through code reviews, pair programming, and knowledge sharing
- Contribute to documentation, runbooks, and internal engineering wikis
Benefits
- generous paid time off
- healthcare coverage for you and your family
- resources to create financial security
- support your mental health
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
