Sr Staff Data Engineer

PayPal • San Jose, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Company 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 participates in complex problem resolution and leads projects of diverse scope requiring an understanding of current business trends. They determine methods and procedures for new or special assignments and drive global process improvements through data-driven insights. Job Description: Essential Responsibilities: Lead complex data engineering projects, ensuring they meet business objectives and deliver actionable insights. Develop advanced data architectures and pipelines to analyze large datasets and solve complex business problems. Collaborate with senior leadership to identify data-driven opportunities for business growth and efficiency. Implement best practices for data management, analysis, and visualization. Ensure data governance and compliance with relevant regulations and standards. Provide mentorship and technical guidance to the data engineering team. Minimum Qualifications: 8+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience. Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications: Job Summary: PayPal is executing a strategic multi-year Marketing Transformation, building an integrated MarTech Platform that enables consistent, personalized digital experiences across PayPal brands. This role is at the heart of building this platform end-to-end - designing and developing the complete data infrastructure, pipelines, and systems that power our next-generation CDP-based Marketing Automation Platform. This is a hands-on technical leadership role at the highest individual contributor level, requiring the ability to operate across multiple capability areas while maintaining deep technical execution. You will lead solution design for complex data systems, connect the dots across teams, and visualize the big picture while remaining deeply involved in hands-on development. The role demands expertise in building enterprise-class data platforms processing billions of records, mastery of both batch and real-time architectures, and the ability to solve the most challenging low-latency business problems. In MarTech, Agentic AI is part of our first principles - you will be expected to lead the charge on Agentic AI, bringing visionary thinking to conceptualize transformative data solutions. You will be recognized as an expert, drive global process improvements, and lead complex cross-functional initiatives. We need someone who can ramp up quickly and operate at the highest technical level from day one. Job Description: Essential Responsibilities: • Lead solution design and hands-on development of enterprise-class data platforms across multiple capability areas • Connect the dots across teams - visualize the big picture while driving technical execution on complex initiatives • Architect and build data systems processing billions of records with expertise spanning batch, real-time, and hybrid architectures • Solve the most challenging low-latency data problems that others cannot, serving as the technical escalation point • Lead Agentic AI innovation - conceptualize and architect transformative data solutions leveraging Agentic AI capabilities • Drive strategic technical decisions across multiple teams, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture and business objectives • Hands-on troubleshooting of the most complex production issues - lead by example in incident response and resolution • Establish engineering best practices, standards, and patterns that elevate data engineering quality across the organization • Mentor Staff and Senior engineers, building technical leadership capabilities through hands-on guidance Expected Qualifications: • 12+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree OR an equivalent combination of education and experience • Technical Leader: Individual Contributor with experience leading through technical excellence Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications: This role operates at the intersection of deep technical execution and broad organizational impact. You will be hands-on daily - writing code, reviewing designs, troubleshooting issues, and building systems - while also driving technical strategy across multiple teams. In MarTech, Agentic AI is a first principle, and you will be expected to lead the organization in applying Agentic AI to data engineering challenges with visionary, outside-the-box thinking. Success requires the ability to zoom out to see the big picture and connect disparate initiatives, then zoom in to solve specific technical challenges with expert-level skill. You are expected to ramp up quickly, earn credibility through technical contribution, and drive improvements that have global impact. Position Responsibilities: • Ramp up quickly across multiple systems and domains to lead and deliver immediately • Operate as the technical authority across multiple capability areas - batch, streaming, data modeling, platform architecture • Lead complex, cross-functional initiatives that span multiple teams, driving alignment through technical excellence • Champion Agentic AI across the organization - lead innovation and adoption of Agentic AI for data solutions • Own solution design for the most complex data engineering challenges, considering trade-offs across scale, latency, cost, and maintainability • Build data solutions at PayPal scale - systems processing billions of records with strict reliability and performance requirements • Drive global process improvements through identification of systemic issues and implementation of solutions • Be hands-on daily - write code, review designs, troubleshoot production issues, and help the team ship faster • Partner with Architects, Product Leaders, and Engineering Leadership to define and execute technical strategy • Foster influential cross-functional relationships through technical credibility and collaborative problem-solving Technical Leadership Qualities: • Lead through demonstrated technical excellence - win credibility by solving hard problems hands-on • Ability to operate across multiple capability areas while maintaining depth in each • Connect the dots across initiatives - visualize the big picture and translate to actionable technical direction • Strong collaboration skills and ability to influence across all organizations and levels • Communicate complex technical concepts clearly, translating organizational goals into execution plans • Motivate others through shared vision and confidence that empowers teams to perform at their best • Operate with transparency and honesty in all interactions

Requirements

• 8+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 12+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree OR an equivalent combination of education and experience
• Technical Leader: Individual Contributor with experience leading through technical excellence
• Demonstrated mastery building enterprise-class data platforms and pipelines at massive scale (billions of records)
• Expert-level SQL skills with proven ability to design, optimize, and troubleshoot the most complex queries
• Deep expertise across both batch processing (Spark, Dataproc) and real-time/streaming systems (Kafka, Pub/Sub, Dataflow)
• Proven track record solving the most challenging low-latency data problems
• Extensive hands-on proficiency with Cloud data services. Preferably - BigQuery, Bigtable, Dataproc, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub
• Strong programming skills in Python with focus on building scalable, maintainable systems
• Experience with solution design across multiple capability areas - data platforms, pipelines, data modeling, analytics
• Deep understanding of data architecture patterns, trade-offs, and best practices at enterprise scale
• Strong execution skills - ability to drive results through combination of hands-on work and team enablement
• Excellent debugging and troubleshooting skills for the most complex distributed system issues
• Demonstrated ability to ramp up quickly and deliver impact in new domains

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Agentic AI - ability to lead and conceptualize transformative data solutions leveraging Agentic AI with visionary, outside-the-box thinking
• Experience in Marketing Technology (MarTech) or Advertising Technology (AdTech) domain
• Experience building Customer Data Platforms (CDP)
• Experience with Customer Segmentation and Activation across owned and paid channels
• Experience with real-time integration with third-party AdTech platforms
• Experience with Attribution and Analytics systems
• Experience enabling ML/AI workloads such as feature stores, training data pipelines, or model monitoring

Responsibilities

• Lead complex data engineering projects, ensuring they meet business objectives and deliver actionable insights.
• Develop advanced data architectures and pipelines to analyze large datasets and solve complex business problems.
• Collaborate with senior leadership to identify data-driven opportunities for business growth and efficiency.
• Implement best practices for data management, analysis, and visualization.
• Ensure data governance and compliance with relevant regulations and standards.
• Provide mentorship and technical guidance to the data engineering team.
• Lead solution design and hands-on development of enterprise-class data platforms across multiple capability areas
• Connect the dots across teams - visualize the big picture while driving technical execution on complex initiatives
• Architect and build data systems processing billions of records with expertise spanning batch, real-time, and hybrid architectures
• Solve the most challenging low-latency data problems that others cannot, serving as the technical escalation point
• Lead Agentic AI innovation - conceptualize and architect transformative data solutions leveraging Agentic AI capabilities
• Drive strategic technical decisions across multiple teams, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture and business objectives
• Hands-on troubleshooting of the most complex production issues - lead by example in incident response and resolution
• Establish engineering best practices, standards, and patterns that elevate data engineering quality across the organization
• Mentor Staff and Senior engineers, building technical leadership capabilities through hands-on guidance
• Ramp up quickly across multiple systems and domains to lead and deliver immediately
• Operate as the technical authority across multiple capability areas - batch, streaming, data modeling, platform architecture
• Lead complex, cross-functional initiatives that span multiple teams, driving alignment through technical excellence
• Champion Agentic AI across the organization - lead innovation and adoption of Agentic AI for data solutions
• Own solution design for the most complex data engineering challenges, considering trade-offs across scale, latency, cost, and maintainability
• Build data solutions at PayPal scale - systems processing billions of records with strict reliability and performance requirements
• Drive global process improvements through identification of systemic issues and implementation of solutions
• Be hands-on daily - write code, review designs, troubleshoot production issues, and help the team ship faster
• Partner with Architects, Product Leaders, and Engineering Leadership to define and execute technical strategy
• Foster influential cross-functional relationships through technical credibility and collaborative problem-solving
• Lead through demonstrated technical excellence - win credibility by solving hard problems hands-on
• Ability to operate across multiple capability areas while maintaining depth in each
• Connect the dots across initiatives - visualize the big picture and translate to actionable technical direction
• Strong collaboration skills and ability to influence across all organizations and levels
• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly, translating organizational goals into execution plans
• Motivate others through shared vision and confidence that empowers teams to perform at their best
• Operate with transparency and honesty in all interactions

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 comprehensive, choice-based programs, to support all aspects of personal wellbeing—physical, emotional, and financial—delivering meaningful value where it matters most.
• We strive to create a flexible, balanced work culture with a holistic approach to benefits, including generous paid time off, healthcare coverage for you and your family, and resources to create financial security and support your mental health.

What This Job Offers

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