Director - Intelligent Routing & Platform Infrastructure

PayPal is a global payments platform that enables merchants and consumers to transact with ease across more than 200 markets. It delivers secure, personalized, and scalable payment solutions for both online and in‑person commerce. Job Description Summary PayPal moves money for hundreds of millions of people and businesses worldwide. This role leads the intelligent fabric that routes, secures, and scales every transaction and API call across our global platform. As a transformation leader, you will own our intelligent routing services, Kubernetes fleet management, and IaaS platforms and set a new standard for how these systems are built, operated, and evolved. Essential Responsibilities Directs and controls the delivery of business and technical outcomes that comprise multiple projects and operational activities within a domain through organizational and technical leadership. Defines engineering health objectives that drive organization health, engineering best practices, and operational targets. Drives product and technical strategy with cross‑functional leaders across the enterprise to deliver domain goals. Responsible for the delivery of programs, establishing annual organizational goals and ensuring performance and results that impact both their domain and potentially enterprise. Develops engineering strategy that translates into operational and tactical plans; uses ground‑breaking methods to think beyond existing solutions. Sets the tri‑annual roadmap for a domain level organization; defines the operational strategy for a domain based on a defined budget. Evaluates key business challenges and can complete complex, ambiguous initiatives having impact across engineering; directs the development of new or innovative solutions. Ability to deal with high levels of technical domain level ambiguity. Collaborates with direct team, managers in org, stakeholders, managers in other orgs, external partners and business stakeholders. Minimum Qualifications 10+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR any equivalent combination of education and experience. 2 years of experience leading others. What You Will Own Intelligent Routing Services Own the strategy, architecture, and execution for Service Mesh (Istio or equivalent) and API Gateway (Kgateway or equivalent) platforms serving PayPal’s microservices and cloud‑native ecosystem. Drive adoption of advanced traffic management capabilities: fine‑grained routing policies, circuit breaking, mutual TLS, observability instrumentation, and progressive delivery patterns (canary, blue/green, A/B). Partner with Security, Reliability, and Product Engineering teams to embed security, compliance, and resilience primitives directly into the routing layer — making safe behaviour the default, not the exception. Kubernetes Fleet Management Lead the engineering teams managing PayPal’s multi‑cluster, multi‑region Kubernetes fleet at one of the largest private Kubernetes deployments in the world. Own the full lifecycle: cluster provisioning, upgrades, node pool management, workload placement policies, autoscaling, resource governance, and decommissioning. Define and enforce fleet‑wide standards for cluster hardening, RBAC models, admission control, and policy enforcement via tools like OPA/Gatekeeper or Kyverno. Drive a platform‑as‑a‑product mindset — engineering teams that consume the platform should experience it as a force multiplier, not a bottleneck. IaaS Platforms – Compute & Traffic Management Own the engineering and roadmap for compute provisioning platforms (bare metal, VM, containerized) supporting PayPal’s private and hybrid cloud infrastructure. Drive the design of traffic management systems including global load balancing, anycast routing, DNS‑based traffic steering, and edge ingress architecture. Build programmatic, API‑first infrastructure surfaces that enable engineering teams to self‑serve confidently, with guardrails baked in. Transformation & Strategy Raise the engineering bar relentlessly. Define what "excellent" looks like across your domains — from design reviews to incident response to capacity planning — and hold your teams and peers to it. Drive from reactive to proactive operations. Lead the shift from ticket‑driven, toil‑heavy operations to an automated, self‑healing, policy‑driven operational model. Establish platform contracts that matter. Define and publish SLOs, SLAs, and reliability commitments for every platform you own, and stand behind them. Modernize at scale without breaking things. Develop and execute migration strategies that move legacy infrastructure and operational models forward without disruption to PayPal’s core business flows. Build bridges, not silos. Partner with Product, Engineering, Security, Operations, and Executive stakeholders to align platform investments with business outcomes. Who You Are – Leadership & People 15+ years of software engineering experience with at least 5+ years leading senior engineering organizations (multiple teams, multiple managers). Proven track record building and developing high‑performing engineering teams, including hiring senior and staff‑level engineers and managers. Ability to attract exceptional talent and build a team culture of ownership, accountability, and psychological safety. Experience leading geographically distributed and diverse teams across time zones and cultures. Strong executive presence: you communicate technical strategy clearly to C‑suite and can defend your architectural bets. Technical Depth Deep expertise in service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd, Envoy), API gateway platforms (Kgateway, Kong, Apigee), and Layer 4/7 traffic management at scale. Hands‑on background in Kubernetes at enterprise scale — you understand the internals well enough to debug, the breadth to set fleet‑wide standards, and the experience to know where the bodies are buried. Strong foundation in IaaS and compute platforms — cloud‑native and private cloud; familiarity with OpenStack, KVM, or equivalent private cloud stacks is a plus. Fluency in networking fundamentals: BGP, DNS, TLS/mTLS, load balancing, CDN architecture. Experience with infrastructure‑as‑code and GitOps practices (Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, Flux). Familiarity with FinOps principles and infrastructure cost optimization at scale. Transformation & Strategy (Continued) Demonstrated history of driving large‑scale platform modernization or operational transformation initiatives — not just contributing to them, but owning them end to end. Strong instincts for developer experience and platform product thinking. Ability to develop multi‑year technical roadmaps that balance innovation, reliability, and pragmatic execution. Comfort operating in ambiguity and making high‑quality decisions with imperfect information. How We Measure Success In your first 3 months, deep understanding of PayPal’s infrastructure landscape, team health, and the most critical gaps in reliability, operations, and capability. Credibility established with peer engineering leaders, key stakeholders, and your own teams. A clear, prioritized transformation roadmap with executive alignment and engineering buy‑in. In your first year, measurable reduction in operational toil and manual interventions across your platforms. Improved platform SLOs and customer satisfaction from internal engineering consumers. Tangible progress on at least one major modernization initiative (mesh adoption, fleet upgrades, certificate lifecycle automation, etc.). A stronger, more empowered team than you inherited — with a reputation as a destination for top infrastructure engineering talent. Compensation Base pay depends on location and experience. Austin, Texas: $198,000.00 – $294,250.00 annually. Additional location: Scottsdale, Arizona: $188,000.00 – $279,400.00 annually. Additional compensation may include an annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation. Benefits Flexible work environment. Employee share options. Health and life insurance. Additional benefits and resources to support financial, physical, and mental health. EEO Statement PayPal provides equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. PayPal will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. #J-18808-Ljbffr SupportFinity™