Staff Backend Engineer & Payments Platform Lead

PayPal, Inc.; San Jose, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 177,000 - 262,000; Full time

Job summary

PayPal, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer in San Jose to lead a Payments Engineering team focused on Venmo and large-scale backend services. You will own design decisions, drive reliability, and mentor engineers while delivering secure, scalable solutions for 65 million users.

You will work in a hybrid environment with strong collaboration across product, platform, and operations, leveraging AWS/GCP and modern data stores to meet ambitious performance goals.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience and a Bachelor's degree or equivalent.
• Experience building scalable backend services and distributed systems.
• Strong leadership and mentoring abilities.

Responsibilities

• Acts as a project or system leader, coordinating engineers on the project or system.
• Determines technical tasks and aligns team efforts with objectives.
• Improves existing structures and processes to drive efficiency.
• Sets engineering standards and ensures quality and reliability.
• Represents PayPal to partners and external audiences.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

Leadership

Mentoring

Project coordination

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Redis

ElastiCache

Hazelcast

SQS

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Pulsar

Terraform

AWS

GCP

Azure

SQL

NoSQL

Job description

PayPal, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer in San Jose to lead a Payments Engineering team focused on Venmo and large-scale backend services. You will own design decisions, drive reliability, and mentor engineers while delivering secure, scalable solutions for 65 million users.

You will work in a hybrid environment with strong collaboration across product, platform, and operations, leveraging AWS/GCP and modern data stores to meet ambitious performance goals.