Staff Database Engineer

PayPal • San Jose, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

At PayPal, the Transaction Processing and Data Services (TPDS) team powers the backbone of our global payments platform, processing billions of transactions through our mission-critical OLTP database infrastructure. We're seeking an exceptional Database Reliability Engineer to join our Database SRE team in a role that combines technical expertise with incident management leadership. As a Database SRE specializing in incident management, you'll be at the forefront of maintaining and improving the reliability of systems that millions of customers depend on daily. This role offers the opportunity to drive significant improvements in our incident response capabilities, with a particular focus on reducing Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) across our database platform.

Requirements

• 5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Expertise in MySQL tuning, replication, indexing, and partitioning.
• Proficiency in Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, and distributed system design.
• Strong multi-cloud experience (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Hands-on experience with Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Packer, and Kubernetes.
• Advanced programming in Python and Bash for automation and integration.
• Deep knowledge of observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK).
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and optimization skills.
• Commitment to security, compliance, and operational excellence.

Responsibilities

• Architect, configure, and manage scalable, highly available database clusters (MySQL, CloudSQL, BigTable, Oracle).
• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, and Kubernetes.
• Develop CI/CD pipelines for schema and infrastructure automation with Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and GitLab CI.
• Design and enforce secure data handling, encryption, and access control practices.
• Optimize database and Big Data systems for performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Build monitoring and observability systems with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, and Datadog.
• Drive SLIs/SLOs/SLAs for database reliability and uptime.
• Automate database and platform management with Python-based tooling.
• Lead on-call rotations and drive root cause analysis and incident resolution.
• Collaborate with DevOps, data engineering, and analytics teams to deliver resilient data solutions.

Benefits

• This role is also eligible for a range of benefits which may include, medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance, parental and family leave, 401(k) savings plan, paid time off, and other benefits.
• At PayPal, we’re committed to building an equitable and inclusive global economy.
• That’s why we offer benefits to help you thrive in every stage of life.
• We champion your financial, physical, and mental health by offering valuable benefits and resources to help you care for the whole you.
• We have great benefits including a flexible work environment, employee shares options, health and life insurance and more.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees