Staff Software Engineer

Cloud/DevOps Engineer

This job acts as a project leader, coordinating the activities of 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.

Essential 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

Expected Qualifications:

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

Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications :

At Venmo, we are creating a product that people love. We strive to create a delightful user experience while connecting the world and empowering people through payments. We are looking for intellectually curious people who want to be inspired and inspire others to change the world.

Engineering is a craft, and at Venmo we want the internals of our software to be as elegant as the end user experience we are designing. We spend our days scaling our infrastructure and building new features to meet and exceed our users' needs and wants. We work with a product team that is data-driven and human-centered in its design principles. We teach and learn from one another and push each other to be at our creative and analytical best.

Our team is dedicated to ensuring the seamless operation of all user-facing services, as well as production and development systems. We manage Venmo's infrastructure comprehensively, encompassing operations, automation, security, compliance, and release engineering. While we are focused on Cloud Engineering, our work integrates elements of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps projects as well.

On the DevOps front, we oversee CI/CD infrastructure, develop smart and secure pipelines, implement self-service secret management systems, create development environments, and establish microservices scaffolding and testing frameworks. The quality of the systems we build is paramount to the company, and we prioritize it highly. Our infrastructure must be delivered automatically, thoroughly tested, and scanned for vulnerabilities through synthetic tests.

As a Staff Engineer, you will support our critical domains, leading major initiatives related to your domain. You will be part of the architect group that defines the future of the Company's technical development. This individual will be a hands-on contributor that teaches by example and mentors other engineers and product owners on how to improve their development, using our systems, by driving best practices. We have a lot of independence in our decisions, but we are kept accountable for the results.

Our technical stack : AWS, EKS, Docker, GitHub Enterprise, CDK, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Datadog, Bash, Python, Go

As a Staff Engineer, you will:

• Contribute and help drive the strategic direction to one or more of our domains, leading initiatives in your area of expertise.
• Act as a hands-on contributor, while leading by example
• Mentor senior and junior engineers
• Enjoy a high degree of independence in decision-making while being accountable for results of yourself and your team
• Be part of a team dedicated to driving the scalability and reliability of Venmo's AWS cloud infrastructure
• Provide guidance, thought leadership, and mentorship to application teams to build and strengthen their cloud competencies

What You'll Do

• Lead major initiatives end-to-end: internal teams rarely have dedicated project managers You will define the design, identify stakeholders, navigate risks and changes, coordinate colleagues' work, implement solutions, and be accountable for timely and quality project delivery.
• Continually raise the bar through assisting fellow engineers in developing and delivering their code more efficiently and securely.
• Troubleshoot incidents, identify root causes, fix and document problems, and implement preventive measures.
• Coach and mentor engineers on design principles and best practices.
• Recognize, validate and evangelize emerging technologies and architectures that align with business objectives.
• Strategically and tactically leading by example, making meaningful contributions to the improvement of engineering teams' production operations.
• Develop and improve tools and automation to manage infrastructure and application configuration as code.
• Enhance the quality, reliability, and stability of our infrastructure and operations.

What We're Looking For

• Bachelors and/or master's in computer science or related field of study
• 7+ years' experience in software development or a related field
• 5+ years' experience operating distributed applications 24x7x365, as part of a Cloud Engineering, DevOps, and/or SRE team.
• 2+ years technical leadership experience
• Extensive hands-on experience with designing, implementing and supporting infrastructure (AWS experience preferred) to support global-scale services
• Deep hands-on experience with IaaS and PaaS solutions from AWS (or similar cloud provider):
• Hands-on programming and scripting (Python, Java, Bash, Go)
• Hands-on experience with containers & container orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes
• Strong communication skills with the ability to understand and explain technical issues to a non-technical audience