Staff Software Engineering

PayPal•San Jose, CA

15h•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. They empower consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy, operating a global, two-sided network connecting hundreds of millions of merchants and consumers. PayPal provides proprietary payment solutions, enabling customers to use their accounts for purchases, payments, transfers, and withdrawals, utilizing various funding sources like bank accounts, PayPal/Venmo balances, credit products, cards, cryptocurrencies, or gift cards. Their products also facilitate safer fund transfers between friends and family. For merchants, PayPal offers an end-to-end payments solution with authorization, settlement, instant fund access, and risk management, while also enabling cross-border shopping and global reach. The company is guided by core values of Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, and Wellness, aiming to work as one global team with customers at the center. This Staff Software Engineering role acts as a project leader, coordinating other engineers, determining technical tasks, and improving existing structures and processes. It involves making technical decisions, collaborating with management to set standards, and representing the company to external partners. The team focuses on leading, driving, and delivering world-class core capabilities in Compliance, Privacy, Identity, Risk, Foundational Commons, and Global Servicing to provide PayPal a global competitive advantage, engaging, protecting, and servicing the PayPal ecosystem to drive trust, engagement, faster time-to-market, and the best possible customer experience. The goal is to provide an industry-leading ecosystem of unified, composable Core Platforms and Experiences that are frictionless, secure, easy to integrate, data & AIML driven, and provide all of the “-ilities” within a holistic architecture that empowers greater agility, faster time-to-market, end-to-end customer journeys, and business outcomes that grow the top and bottom line for PayPal.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

AWS experience
Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude) for code generation, testing, and documentation

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
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

Benefits

Comprehensive, choice-based programs, to support all aspects of personal wellbeing—physical, emotional, and financial
Flexible, balanced work culture
Holistic approach to benefits
Generous paid time off
Healthcare coverage for you and your family
Resources to create financial security
Resources to support your mental health
Annual performance bonus
Equity
Other incentive compensation