Staff Software Engineer

PayPal • San Jose, CA

2d • 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. We're seeking an exceptional Staff Engineer to lead our backend engineering efforts on the Venmo Risk team at PayPal. This role acts as a project leader, coordinating the activities of other engineers, determining technical tasks, and continuously improving existing structures and processes. You'll make critical technical decisions, collaborate with management to establish engineering standards, and represent PayPal to external partners and vendors.

Requirements

• 5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.

Nice To Haves

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years building and scaling backend distributed systems in production
• Expert-level proficiency in Java , Spring and Microservices with deep understanding of JVM internals, concurrency models, memory management, and performance optimization
• Proven experience architecting and deploying microservices architectures in cloud-native environments, particularly Google Cloud Platform (GCP) (AWS experience also valued)
• Strong expertise with Designing RESTful APIs, Caching , Data modeling, Partitioning strategies, and query optimization
• Hands-on experience with message streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka and Google Pub/Sub for event-driven architectures
• Define and maintain team coding guidelines for Java, microservices design, API contracts, and database interactions by working thru matrix org.
• Demonstrated success designing and operating systems handling high-throughput, low-latency workloads (100k+ transactions per second)
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude) for code generation, testing, and documentation.
• Lead architectural decisions and technical strategy across multiple engineering teams
• Serve as the primary technical authority for system design, establishing patterns and best practices
• Drive cross-functional collaboration with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Risk, Payments and Compliance teams
• Champion API strategy development and execution, ensuring alignment with product roadmaps and business objectives
• Mentor engineers through comprehensive code reviews, maintaining high-quality standards and promoting engineering excellence
• Participate in on-call rotations, leading incident response and driving resolution for critical production issues
• Design for reliability, scalability, and performance across distributed systems
• Oversee the development and optimization of API endpoints, ensuring they meet stringent SLA requirements
• Implement observability and monitoring solutions to maintain system health and performance

Responsibilities

• Acts as a project or system leader, coordinating the activities of other engineers on the project or within the system
• Determines the technical tasks that other engineers will follow
• Actions result in the achievement of customer, operational, program or service objectives
• Proactively improves existing structures & processes
• Exercises judgement in reconciling diverse and competing priorities (time, quality, complexity risk) to identify optimal solutions to problems
• Notices patterns and condenses repetition into densely meaningful generalized solutions
• Collaborates with management to set/improve standards for engineering rigor
• Trusted to represent PayPal, Inc to the outside world via interactions with partners, customers, or industry organizations

Benefits

• PayPal's balanced hybrid work model offers 3 days in the office for effective in-person collaboration and 2 days at your choice of either the PayPal office or your home workspace, ensuring that you equally have the benefits and conveniences of both locations.
• generous paid time off
• healthcare coverage for you and your family
• resources to create financial security and support your mental health

What This Job Offers

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