Senior AI Growth Engineer: Real-Time Agents & Multimodal

BAM Ventures; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 197,000 - 292,000; Full time

Job summary

PayPal is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer for the AI Growth & Innovation group in San Jose. You will turn ambiguous problems into clear viewpoints, prototype fast, and scale proven ideas into secure, cost-efficient platform capabilities.

You’ll own high-visibility bets from research through production, collaborating with product, design, and engineering to deliver tangible improvements. Responsibilities include researching new models and frameworks, launching experiments with safe rollouts, and

Qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant experience and a bachelor’s degree or equivalent.
• Experience shipping to real users and scaling early ideas into reliable, secure, cost-efficient products.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs or agentic systems, at work or on independent projects.
• Bias toward fast, scrappy prototyping: build rough versions to test against reality rather than extensive planning.
• Comfort with ambiguity and strong research instincts; design quick experiments to prove or disprove hypotheses.
• Drive and ownership; take on stretch problems and see them through to shipping.
• Strong engineering fundamentals in at least one modern language.
• Clear communication with engineers and executives.

Responsibilities

• Make technical decisions affecting multiple teams and cross organizational boundaries.
• Establish conventions and processes to be followed by other employees.
• Allocate resources and affect company effectiveness through decisions.
• Handle multiple, multi-team initiatives and prioritize effectively.
• Apply up-to-date industry capabilities and practices for optimal results.
• Explain technical issues to non-technical audiences.
• Spread knowledge and best practices to improve others’ results.
• Partner with product management to ideate solutions to business problems.

Skills

Senior/Staff engineer

Shipping to real users

LLMs/agentic systems

Prototyping

Ambiguity handling

Communication with executives

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Job description

PayPal is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer for the AI Growth & Innovation group in San Jose. You will turn ambiguous problems into clear viewpoints, prototype fast, and scale proven ideas into secure, cost-efficient platform capabilities.

You’ll own high-visibility bets from research through production, collaborating with product, design, and engineering to deliver tangible improvements. Responsibilities include researching new models and frameworks, launching experiments with safe rollouts, and