Sr Staff Backend Engineer - Venmo Product
About The Position
As a leader in Venmo’s fastest-growing segment, Consumer Financial Services (CFS), this role is primarily accountable for the domain’s backend platform features, capabilities, and quality. The engineer partners with the Senior Director and makes technical decisions that affect multiple teams, establishes conventions and processes, handles multi-team initiatives, applies industry best practices, communicates technical issues, mentors others, and works with product management. The role sets technical direction for Venmo’s CFS platform, including authentication, authorization, CFS verification, and fraud risk systems. It owns complex, cross-cutting problems from initial design through production; partners with PayPal platform and security teams on shared standards and infrastructure; leads architectural reviews; and defines engineering standards for building, scaling, and securing systems. The position mentors senior engineers without managing them and collaborates with Product, Legal, Compliance, and Security to turn regulatory and risk requirements into technical solutions. The engineer proactively identifies risks, owns service performance and availability, participates in on-call rotations, supports incidents, and contributes to complex projects with colleagues. The role is based in a balanced hybrid work model for the majority of employees: three days in the office and two days at either the office or home workspace. Travel is listed as 0 percent.
Requirements
- At least 8 years of relevant experience and a bachelor’s degree, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
- 12 or more years of software engineering experience, including significant experience with backend platforms, authentication, or security-critical systems at scale.
- Deep expertise in Python and API management, including OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, and FIDO2/WebAuthn.
- A proven record of defining and shipping large-scale distributed systems and leading technical strategy across multiple teams or organizations.
- Hands-on experience with backend systems at scale using Python, Java, Go, or similar, and cloud platforms such as AWS.
- Security engineering fundamentals sufficient to reason about threat models, data handling, and attack surfaces.
- Experience designing or working on systems subject to regulatory requirements such as KYC, AML, or GDPR, and translating compliance constraints into engineering decisions.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including writing design documents, participating in executive reviews, and explaining technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders.
- Expertise with distributed services and backend systems.
- Experience building services on public cloud; AWS is preferred.
- Experience managing infrastructure as code using Terraform.
Nice To Haves
- A bachelor’s and/or master’s degree in computer science, a related field, or equivalent experience.
- Experience with public cloud services, preferably AWS.
- Experience with regulatory requirements such as KYC, AML, GDPR, or PCI.
Responsibilities
- Make technical decisions that affect multiple teams and cross organizational boundaries.
- Establish conventions and processes for other employees to follow.
- Handle multiple multi-team initiatives simultaneously and prioritize among competing issues.
- Apply current industry capabilities and practices judiciously.
- Communicate technical issues to non-technical audiences.
- Improve other employees’ technical results by sharing knowledge, modeling behavior, mentoring, and providing documentation and working sessions.
- Partner with product management to ideate solutions to business problems and goals.
- Set technical direction for Venmo’s CFS platform, including authentication, authorization, CFS verification, and fraud risk systems.
- Own complex, cross-cutting problems from initial design through production.
- Partner with PayPal platform and security teams on shared Venmo standards, reusable infrastructure, and cross-organizational initiatives.
- Lead architectural reviews and define engineering standards for building, scaling, and securing CFS systems.
- Mentor and develop senior engineers through design documents, code reviews, technical discussions, and example-setting.
- Work with Product, Legal, Compliance, and Security to translate regulatory and risk requirements into technical solutions.
- Identify and address risks such as fragile authentication flows, compliance gaps, and scaling bottlenecks before they become incidents.
- Own service performance and availability, participate in on-call rotations, and support incident response.
- Learn and contribute to complex projects alongside colleagues.
Benefits
- Generous paid time off.
- Healthcare coverage for employees and their families.
- Resources to support financial security and mental health.
- Annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation, as applicable.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
