Sr. Identity Platform Architect — Scale & Security

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

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Venmo seeks a Sr. Staff Software Engineer to own and advance the identity infrastructure that underpins trust, safety, and compliance on the PayPal Venmo platform. You will be a subject matter expert with deep hands-on experience in identity, authentication, and security at scale.

You will collaborate with PayPal teams to align on standards, drive architecture, and mentor engineers while managing complex, cross-team initiatives and risk-aware design decisions.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with identity/authentication or security-critical systems at scale.
• Bachelor's or higher in CS or related field (or equivalent).
• Expert in identity protocols (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, FIDO2/WebAuthn).

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for Venmo's identity platform, incl. auth, authorization and fraud risk systems.
• Partner with PayPal platform/security teams on shared standards and infrastructure.
• Lead architectural reviews and establish engineering standards for identity systems.
• Mentor senior engineers through design docs, code reviews and collaborations.
• Translate regulatory and risk requirements (KYC, AML, GDPR, PCI) into scalable solutions.
• Own performance, availability and on-call participation.

Skills

Identity domain expertise

OAuth 2.0 / OIDC / SAML

Distributed systems

Backend languages (Python/Java/Go)

AWS / Cloud security

Regulatory compliance (KYC/AML/GDPR/PI

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Master's degree (optional)

Tools

Terraform

Job description

Venmo seeks a Sr. Staff Software Engineer to own and advance the identity infrastructure that underpins trust, safety, and compliance on the PayPal Venmo platform. You will be a subject matter expert with deep hands-on experience in identity, authentication, and security at scale.

You will collaborate with PayPal teams to align on standards, drive architecture, and mentor engineers while managing complex, cross-team initiatives and risk-aware design decisions.