Staff Software Engineer, Backend Python
About The Position
PayPal is hiring a Staff Software Engineer, Backend Python to lead engineering efforts and team-level processes, coordinate engineering work, and provide technical leadership for a small team. The role owns the design, implementation, performance, availability, and operational excellence of software components and services, helping ensure they are secure, reliable, and scalable. It contributes to engineering roadmaps through assessments of implementation alternatives and trade-offs, and provides technical advice to senior leaders on systems, solutions, challenges, and strategy. The position is based in a balanced hybrid work model: for most employees, three days in the office and two days at either the office or home. 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.
- Advanced skills with RDBMS and NoSQL data stores, caching solutions, and messaging or queuing protocols and systems.
- Expertise in distributed services and backend systems.
- Experience building services on a public cloud.
- Experience managing infrastructure as code using Terraform.
- Experience working with fault-tolerant and scalable distributed services and systems.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with caching solutions such as Redis, ElastiCache, or Hazelcast.
- Experience with messaging or queuing systems such as SQS, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Pulsar.
- Public cloud experience with AWS or GCP; Azure is also mentioned.
Responsibilities
- Act as a project or system leader, coordinating the activities of engineers working on a project or system.
- Determine the technical tasks that other engineers will follow.
- Lead engineering efforts and team-level processes by defining outcomes, refining processes, and advising senior leaders on systems, solutions, challenges, and strategy.
- Support end-to-end ownership of software component design, implementation, and operational excellence, while improving existing structures and processes.
- Assess implementation alternatives and trade-offs and provide recommendations for the technical engineering roadmap.
- Provide technical leadership to a small team with minimal guidance from management or senior teammates.
- Design, estimate, and implement new and refactored software services securely, reliably, and at scale.
- Own the quality of software component design and implementation, and deliver high-quality code on time while following the SDLC process.
- Own service performance and availability, participate in on-call rotations, and provide support during incidents.
- Coordinate competing priorities involving time, quality, complexity, and risk to identify optimal solutions.
- Identify patterns and turn repeated work into generalized solutions.
- Collaborate with management to establish and improve engineering rigor standards.
- Represent PayPal in interactions with partners, customers, or industry organizations.
- Lead projects and mentor engineering staff at all levels, while managing relationships with Product, Engineering Operations, business, and support teams.
- Learn and contribute to complex projects alongside colleagues.
Benefits
- Generous paid time off.
- Healthcare coverage for employees and their families.
- Resources to support financial security and mental health.
- 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
