Staff Database Engineer

PayPal • San Jose, CA

6d • $160,500 - $262,350 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Staff Database Engineer will join Venmo’s Data Platforms team, which engineers and operates internal and customer-facing production data stores, including Aurora MySQL, Amazon DocumentDB, Cassandra, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, and DynamoDB. The role partners with engineering leadership to prioritize initiatives that align service operations with business goals and serves as a hands-on technical leader who mentors engineers and product owners to improve availability, reliability, and scalability through best practices.

The engineer designs, implements, automates, and operates next-generation cloud-native database systems. The role drives operational excellence through automation and AI-driven optimization, collaborating with infrastructure and product teams to support data-driven innovation, platform resilience, and continued growth.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of relevant experience and a bachelor’s degree, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Expertise with infrastructure as code, including AWS CLI, AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, Ansible, or Puppet.
• Expertise with programming and scripting, including Lambda, API Gateway, Python, Java, or Bash.
• Expertise in database design for relational and non-relational data stores.
• Expertise in database operations involving AWS DynamoDB, AWS DocumentDB, Cassandra, MySQL, AWS Aurora, Redis, or Elasticsearch.
• Experience mentoring and developing leads and engineers.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain technical issues to non-technical audiences.

Nice To Haves

• AWS Solutions Architect certification.

Responsibilities

• Act as a project or system leader, coordinating the activities of other engineers on a project or within a system.
• Determine the technical tasks that other engineers will follow.
• Deliver work that achieves customer, operational, program, or service objectives.
• Proactively improve existing structures and processes.
• Use judgment to reconcile competing priorities involving time, quality, complexity, and risk, and identify optimal solutions.
• Identify patterns and consolidate repeated work into generalized solutions.
• Collaborate with management to set and improve standards for engineering rigor.
• Represent PayPal in interactions with partners, customers, or industry organizations.
• Design, implement, automate, and operate cloud-native database systems.
• Mentor engineers and product owners and help improve service availability, reliability, and scalability.
• Drive operational excellence through automation and AI-driven optimization.
• Collaborate with infrastructure and product teams.

Benefits

• Generous paid time off.
• Healthcare coverage for employees and their families.
• Resources to support financial security and mental health.
• Potential annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation, as applicable.

What This Job Offers

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