Sr Staff Software Engineer

PayPal•San Jose, CA

3d•$178,500 - $291,500•Hybrid

About The Position

Venmo's identity infrastructure is foundational — it underpins trust, safety, and compliance for every transaction on the platform. This is a rare opportunity to own a high-stakes technical domain at scale, with the backing of PayPal's resources and the speed of a product people love. As a Sr. Staff Software Engineer, you will be a subject matter expert. We are looking for technologists with the highest levels of technical talent, programming, and communication skills with a keen desire to deeply understand our product and how to make our systems more robust and more resilient.

Requirements

8+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
12+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent on identity, authentication, or security-critical systems at scale.
Deep expertise in identity and access management — including protocols like OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, FIDO2/WebAuthn — and a strong intuition for where they're applied correctly versus where they're abused.
Proven track record of defining and shipping large-scale distributed systems, with experience leading technical strategy across multiple teams or organizations.
Hands-on comfort with backend systems at scale (Python, Java, Go, or similar) and Cloud (AWS), along with the security engineering fundamentals to reason carefully about threat models, data handling, and attack surfaces.
Experience working with or designing systems that meet regulatory requirements — KYC, AML, GDPR, or similar — and translating compliance constraints into implementable engineering decisions.
Strong communication skills. You can write a crisp design doc, hold your own in an executive review, and explain a hard technical tradeoff to a non-technical stakeholder without losing precision.
Expert with distributed services and backend systems
Experience in managing infrastructure as code using Terraform

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s and/or Master’s in computer science, or a related field of study, or equivalent experience
Experience building services on public cloud – preferably AWS

Responsibilities

Makes technical decisions affecting multiple teams, crossing organizational boundaries
Establishes conventions & processes to be followed by other employees
Actions determine the utilization of company resources (people, money, assets) and affect the effectiveness of the company
Handles multiple, multi-team initiatives simultaneously, using judgement to prioritize among more issues than can be handled individually.
Understands evolving industry capabilities & practices and can judiciously apply up--to-date information for optimal results
Competent at communicating technical issues with non-technical audiences
Spreads their behavior, principles, and knowledge as a means of improving technical results of other employees (via many means – modeling behavior, 1:1s, working sessions, quality documentation)
Partners with product management, to ideate solutions to business problems & goals
Set the technical direction for Venmo's identity platform, including authentication, authorization, identity verification, and fraud risk systems.
Own the most complex, cross-cutting problems and drive them to resolution — from initial design through production.
Partner with PayPal's platform and security teams to align on shared identity standards, reusable infrastructure, and cross-org initiatives, acting as a bridge between Venmo's product needs and PayPal's enterprise capabilities.
Lead architectural reviews and define engineering standards for how the Identity team builds, scales, and secures its systems.
Raise the bar on design quality, reliability, and security posture across the org.
Mentor and develop senior engineers. You don't manage people, but you shape how the team thinks — through design docs, code reviews, technical debates, and examples.
Collaborate with Product, Legal, Compliance, and Security to translate regulatory and risk requirements (KYC, AML, GDPR, PCI) into sound technical solutions that don't sacrifice developer experience or system performance.
Identify and proactively address risks — whether that's a fragile authentication flow, a compliance gap, or a scaling bottleneck — before they become incidents.
Own the performance and availability of the services, as well as participate in on-call rotations and provide support during incidents.
Have an appetite for learning and contributing to complex projects alongside your colleagues.