Sr Staff Software Engineer, AI Innovation
About The Position
Join PayPal’s AI Growth & Innovation team to take emerging AI from zero to N by building and enhancing agentic systems, real-time voice, and multimodal experiences in production for real customers. The Senior Staff Engineer turns ambiguous problems and emerging technologies into a point of view, rapidly prototypes to test hypotheses, and scales successful ideas into reliable, secure products. The role owns high-visibility initiatives end-to-end, from research through production. Work includes researching models and frameworks, launching experiments using safe-rollout practices, tracking quality, latency, cost, and impact metrics, and extending the agent platform’s orchestration, tool use, and evaluation. The engineer partners with product, design, and engineering to transform validated ideas into platform capabilities. The role makes technical decisions that affect multiple teams and organizational boundaries, establishes conventions and processes, and manages multiple multi-team initiatives while prioritizing competing issues. It applies evolving industry capabilities and practices, communicates technical issues to non-technical audiences, and shares expertise to improve other employees’ technical results. The engineer also partners with product management to devise solutions to business problems and goals. PayPal’s balanced hybrid work model has most employees work three days in the office and two days either at the office or at home. Travel is listed as 0%.
Requirements
- 8+ years of relevant experience and a bachelor’s degree, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
- Senior- or staff-level engineering experience with impact beyond personal code contributions.
- Track record of shipping products to real users and scaling early ideas into reliable, secure, cost-efficient products.
- Hands-on experience building with LLMs or agentic systems at work, in a startup, or through serious independent projects.
- Bias toward fast, scrappy prototyping and testing ambiguous ideas against reality.
- Comfort with ambiguity and strong research instincts, including rapidly learning, designing experiments to test hypotheses, and applying findings.
- Drive and ownership, including taking on stretch problems, extending beyond assigned scope, and following through to shipment.
- Strong engineering fundamentals in at least one modern programming language.
- Clear communication with engineers and executives.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with real-time voice or multimodal systems.
- Experience with automated evaluation and observability for AI systems.
- Deep knowledge of model fine-tuning, its trade-offs, and when to use it.
Responsibilities
- Make technical decisions affecting multiple teams and organizational boundaries.
- Establish conventions and processes for other employees to follow.
- Handle multiple multi-team initiatives 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 through role modeling, one-to-ones, working sessions, and documentation.
- Partner with product management to ideate solutions to business problems and goals.
- Research models and frameworks and rapidly prototype experiments to validate hypotheses.
- Launch experiments using safe-rollout practices and track quality, latency, cost, and impact metrics.
- Extend the agent platform’s orchestration, tool use, and evaluation.
- Own high-visibility initiatives from research through production and scale validated ideas into reliable, secure products.
- Partner with product, design, and engineering to turn validated ideas into platform capabilities.
Benefits
- Generous paid time off.
- Healthcare coverage for employees and their families.
- Resources supporting financial security and mental health.
- Additional compensation may include an 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
