Staff Site Reliability Engineer (Mobile)

PayPal•San Jose, CA

42d•Hybrid

About The Position

At PayPal, Staff Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of our global systems. We're launching a new Mobile SRE team to bridge mobile clients and backend systems, delivering seamless end-to-end customer experiences. This role focuses on mobile reliability, performance, and observability. As the Staff Mobile SRE, you'll define strategy, set reliability standards, and align practices across mobile and backend SRE teams. You'll drive improvements in app stability, reduce crashes, and elevate performance through automation, monitoring, and mentorship-fostering a culture of operational excellence across the organization.

Requirements

5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
Expertise defining and implementing SLIs/SLOs for distributed and client-server systems.
Hands-on experience with Datadog or similar platforms for monitoring, alerting, and dashboards.
Proven ability to lead on-call rotations, incident response, and postmortems.
Strong programming skills in Python, Go, or similar, with working knowledge of Swift or Kotlin for client instrumentation.
Experience building automation and internal tools to improve reliability and efficiency.
Skilled in integrating CI/CD systems (Harness, Jenkins, Fastlane) for mobile deployments.
Partner with engineering teams to ensure robust monitoring, alerting, and dashboards for critical mobile services.
Create and maintain runbooks and playbooks to standardize operational practices and empower teams to self-manage reliability.
Lead post-incident reviews, identify areas for improvement, and help implement proactive reliability measures.
Collaborate with the Datadog observability team to enhance signal quality and alerting efficiency.
Strong communication and leadership skills with a proven ability to mentor and influence across teams.

Nice To Haves

Strong knowledge of iOS and/or Android performance and reliability challenges.
Experience with Bazel, Gradle, or similar build systems.
Familiarity with backend reliability and distributed systems concepts.
Proven success introducing on-call or observability practices within engineering teams.
Experience with large-scale, customer-facing mobile or fintech systems.

Responsibilities

Manage and deliver large-scale reliability improvement projects, ensuring systems are performant, available, and resilient.
Drive the identification of performance bottlenecks and lead initiatives to optimize and scale critical systems and services.
Architect and implement scalable infrastructure solutions to support growing user demands while maintaining system reliability.
Lead the design and enhancement of monitoring frameworks, ensuring systems are highly observable, and support the response to production incidents.
Take ownership of improving system resilience by designing fault-tolerant architectures and implementing disaster recovery strategies.
Lead capacity planning initiatives to ensure system resources are proactively managed, preventing downtime or performance degradation under high load.
Work closely with development, operations, and other technical teams to ensure seamless system integration and align on best practices for reliability.
Act as a technical mentor within the organization, guiding teams through complex reliability challenges and promoting a culture of excellence.
Help define and execute long-term reliability engineering strategies and standards to ensure the scalability and performance of core services.
Develop and enforce best practices for operational excellence, including automation, incident management, and system monitoring, across engineering teams.