Staff Software Engineer Experimentation

PayPal • San Jose, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

PayPal has been revolutionizing commerce globally for more than 25 years. Creating innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, PayPal empowers consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy. We operate a global, two-sided network at scale that connects hundreds of millions of merchants and consumers. We help merchants and consumers connect, transact, and complete payments, whether they are online or in person. PayPal is more than a connection to third-party payment networks. We provide proprietary payment solutions accepted by merchants that enable the completion of payments on our platform on behalf of our customers. We offer our customers the flexibility to use their accounts to purchase and receive payments for goods and services, as well as the ability to transfer and withdraw funds. We enable consumers to exchange funds more safely with merchants using a variety of funding sources, which may include a bank account, a PayPal or Venmo account balance, PayPal and Venmo branded credit products, a credit card, a debit card, certain cryptocurrencies, or other stored value products such as gift cards, and eligible credit card rewards. Our PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom products also make it safer and simpler for friends and family to transfer funds to each other. We offer merchants an end-to-end payments solution that provides authorization and settlement capabilities, as well as instant access to funds and payouts. We also help merchants connect with their customers, process exchanges and returns, and manage risk. We enable consumers to engage in cross-border shopping and merchants to extend their global reach while reducing the complexity and friction involved in enabling cross-border trade. Our beliefs are the foundation for how we conduct business every day. We live each day guided by our core values of Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, and Wellness. Together, our values ensure that we work together as one global team with our customers at the center of everything we do – and they push us to ensure we take care of ourselves, each other, and our communities. Job Summary: About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer / Technical Lead to own and evolve PayPal's experimentation and feature management platform — the infrastructure that powers A/B testing, feature flagging, and controlled rollouts across our product portfolio. This role sits within Platform Engineering and is central to how PayPal ships, measures, and de-risks product changes at scale across Venmo, Braintree, Honey, Zettle, Checkout, and other business units. You won't just maintain tooling — you'll define the strategy, architecture, and developer experience for how experimentation works across the company. You'll partner closely with product, data science, and engineering leadership to make experimentation a first-class capability embedded into every release.

Requirements

• 5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 5–8 years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent building or operating experimentation platforms, feature flag systems, or developer platform infrastructure.
• Deep hands-on experience with A/B testing frameworks — experiment design, assignment logic, metric instrumentation, and statistical analysis pipelines.
• Strong systems design skills — you can architect high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems and make sound trade-offs around consistency, availability, and performance.
• Production experience with feature flag infrastructure at scale — targeting rules, gradual rollouts, flag lifecycle management, and integration with deployment pipelines.
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages (Java, Python, Go, or Node.js) and comfort working across the stack when needed.
• Experience leading technical initiatives end-to-end — from problem framing and design through execution and operational handoff.
• Strong communication skills — you can translate platform capabilities into business value for non-technical stakeholders and write clear technical documentation for engineers.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with commercial experimentation or feature management platforms (Statsig, LaunchDarkly, Split, Optimizely, or similar).
• Familiarity with Bayesian and frequentist experimental design, including sequential testing, multi-armed bandits, and interference detection.
• Experience operating platforms in regulated environments with PCI-DSS, SOX, or similar compliance requirements.
• Background in building internal developer portals, self-service tooling, or platform-as-a-product organizations.
• Experience working in large-scale fintech or payments environments with high reliability and availability expectations.

Responsibilities

• Directly manages software development projects (including program management) and execution through individual contributors. May also lead project teams across platforms or groups
• Implements processes to drive strong operational hygiene for all components and systems within their group
• Responsible for the delivery of projects, including quality and timeliness, that impact their domain and potentially one other
• Demonstrates strong tactical ability by managing the roadmap for a scrum team responsible for technical issues of diverse scope where analysis requires an understanding of current business or tends
• Competent at communicating technical issues with non-technical audiences
• Analyzes multiple sources of information and identifies & resolves complex technical, operational, and organizational problems relating to software development.
• Collaborates with direct team, managers in org, stakeholders such as Product Owners & PMO
• Own the end-to-end architecture of PayPal's experimentation platform, including A/B/n testing, multivariate testing, feature flags, and progressive rollout infrastructure.
• Design and build scalable, low-latency feature flag evaluation and experiment assignment systems that operate reliably at PayPal's transaction volume.
• Define the platform roadmap in partnership with product and engineering leadership, balancing developer experience, statistical rigor, and operational reliability.
• Build and maintain SDKs, APIs, and developer interfaces that make it easy for engineering teams to instrument experiments, define audiences, and analyze results.
• Ensure statistical integrity of the experimentation framework — support for proper sample sizing, metric guardrails, sequential testing, and false discovery rate controls.
• Enable self-service experimentation workflows that reduce cycle time from hypothesis to production insight.
• Architect feature flag infrastructure that supports targeted rollouts, kill switches, entitlement-based access, and environment-specific configurations.
• Build governance and lifecycle management for feature flags — creation, ownership, staleness detection, and automated cleanup.
• Ensure feature management integrates cleanly with CI/CD pipelines, deployment tooling, and observability systems.
• Set technical direction and engineering standards for the experimentation platform team.
• Lead design reviews, drive architectural decisions, and establish patterns that scale across a large, distributed engineering organization.
• Mentor and grow engineers on the team; raise the bar on code quality, system design, and operational excellence.
• Partner cross-functionally with data science, product analytics, and infrastructure teams to align on measurement frameworks and data pipelines.
• Evaluate and integrate third-party experimentation and feature management platforms (e.g., Statsig, LaunchDarkly, Split, Optimizely) where appropriate.
• Drive build-vs-buy decisions grounded in PayPal's scale requirements, compliance constraints (PCI-DSS, SOX), and long-term platform strategy.
• Own vendor integration architecture, ensuring clean abstractions that avoid lock-in.

Benefits

• At PayPal, we’re committed to building an equitable and inclusive global economy. And we can’t do this without our most important asset-you. That’s why we offer comprehensive, choice-based programs, to support all aspects of personal wellbeing—physical, emotional, and financial—delivering meaningful value where it matters most.
• We strive to create a flexible, balanced work culture with a holistic approach to benefits, including generous paid time off, healthcare coverage for you and your family, and resources to create financial security and support your mental health.

What This Job Offers

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