PayPal · 10 hours ago
Staff Software Engineer
San Jose, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$176K/yr - $262K/yr
5+ years expPayPal has been revolutionizing commerce globally for more than 25 years, and they are seeking an exceptional Staff Engineer to lead their backend engineering efforts on the Venmo Risk team. In this role, you'll coordinate the activities of other engineers, make critical technical decisions, and continuously improve existing structures and processes.
E-CommerceFinTechPaymentsE-Commerce PlatformsMobile PaymentsTransaction Processing
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
Qualification
Required
5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience
Preferred
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
Benefits
Flexible work environment
Employee shares options
Health and life insurance
Company
PayPal
PayPal is a financial service company that provides online payment solutions to its users worldwide.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
PayPal has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1144)
2024 (917)
2023 (775)
2022 (921)
2021 (1051)
2020 (1049)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$12.17BKey Investors
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.Madison Dearborn Partners,VertexClearstone Venture Partners,Goldman Sachs
2025-11-17Post Ipo Debt· $6.95B
2023-06-07Post Ipo Debt· $5B
2015-07-20IPO
Leadership Team
Alex Chriss
President & CEO
Simon Bladon
PayPal UK CEO
Recent News
Crowdfund Insider
2026-02-08
2026-02-07
Company data provided by crunchbase