Staff Database Engineer

PayPal • San Jose, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

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

The role designs, implements, automates, and operates next-generation cloud-native database systems. It drives operational excellence through automation and AI-driven optimization, and collaborates with infrastructure and product teams to support Venmo’s data-driven innovation, platform resilience, and continued growth. The position acts as a project or system leader, coordinates engineers’ work, determines technical tasks, improves engineering standards and processes, and represents PayPal in external interactions with partners, customers, or industry organizations.

The role is based in a balanced hybrid work model for most employees: three days in the office and two days at either a PayPal office or home workspace. Travel is listed as 0%.

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 with AWS DynamoDB, AWS DocumentDB, Cassandra, MySQL, AWS Aurora, Redis, or Elasticsearch.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to understand and explain technical issues to a non-technical audience.

Nice To Haves

• AWS Solutions Architect certification or qualification preferred.
• Experience mentoring and developing leads and engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead projects or systems and coordinate the activities of other engineers.
• Determine the technical tasks that other engineers will follow.
• Improve existing structures and processes to achieve customer, operational, program, or service objectives.
• Balance time, quality, complexity, and risk to identify optimal solutions.
• Identify recurring patterns and develop generalized solutions.
• Collaborate with management to establish and improve standards for engineering rigor.
• Design, implement, automate, and operate cloud-native database systems.
• Drive operational excellence through automation and AI-driven optimization.
• Mentor engineers and product owners to improve service availability, reliability, and scalability.
• Collaborate with infrastructure and product teams to support data-driven innovation, platform resilience, and growth.
• Represent PayPal in interactions with partners, customers, or industry organizations.

Benefits

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

What This Job Offers

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