Staff Software Engineering

Job Summary 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 and 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 or improve standards for engineering rigor Trusted to represent PayPal, Inc to the outside world via interactions with partners, customers, or industry organizations Minimum Qualifications 5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR any equivalent combination of education and experience About the team Lead, drive, and deliver world-class core capabilities in Compliance, Privacy, Identity, Risk, Foundational Commons, and Global Servicing that provide PayPal a global competitive advantage by engaging, protecting, and servicing our PayPal ecosystem to drive trust, engagement, faster time-to-market, and the best possible customer experience. Provide an industry-leading ecosystem of unified, composable Core Platforms and Experiences that are frictionless, secure, easy to integrate, data-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. Experience & Technical Expertise 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 through 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 Leadership & Collaboration 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 Operational 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 Compensation Base salary: San Jose, California: $176,500.00 - $262,350.00 annually. Additional compensation may include an annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation, as applicable. Equal Employment Opportunity 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. In addition, PayPal will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. If you are unable to submit an application because of incompatible assistive technology or a disability, please contact us at View email address on click.appcast.io. #J-18808-Ljbffr