Senior AI Growth & Innovation Engineer (Real-Time Agents)

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

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

PayPal is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to join AI Growth & Innovation in San Jose, CA. You will turn ambiguous problems and emerging AI into production-ready, secure products, owning high-visibility bets end-to-end from research to deployment.

You will research new models, launch experiments with safe rollouts, track metrics like quality and latency, and extend our agent platform with orchestration and evaluation capabilities.

Qualifications

• 8+ years relevant engineering experience with 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, in a startup, or on serious independent projects
• Bias toward fast, scrappy prototyping: build a rough version and test against reality rather than debating on paper
• Comfort with ambiguity and strong research instincts: design quick experiments to prove or disprove a hypothesis

Responsibilities

• Makes technical decisions affecting multiple teams, crossing organizational boundaries
• Establishes conventions & processes to be followed by other employees
• Actions determine the utilization of company resources and affect the company’s effectiveness
• Handles multiple, multi-team initiatives simultaneously, prioritizing among many issues

Skills

Senior/Staff-level engineer

Shipping to real users

LLMs/agentic systems

Prototyping mindset

Clear communication

Education

Bachelor's degree

Job description

PayPal is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to join AI Growth & Innovation in San Jose, CA. You will turn ambiguous problems and emerging AI into production-ready, secure products, owning high-visibility bets end-to-end from research to deployment.

You will research new models, launch experiments with safe rollouts, track metrics like quality and latency, and extend our agent platform with orchestration and evaluation capabilities.