Staff Software Engineer

Jobtailor; California (MO); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

PayPal is seeking an experienced engineering leader to coordinate a small team of engineers, set technical direction, and own the design and operation of scalable software services. You will mentor staff, align with product and operations teams, and drive architectural decisions across distributed systems.

The role emphasizes security, reliability, and performance, with responsibility for on-call incident support and strategic roadmap contributions in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of relevant experience with a Bachelor's degree or equivalent
• 8+ years' experience with Python or equivalent high-level language
• Advanced skills with RDBMS and NoSQL datastores

Responsibilities

• Act as a project or system leader, coordinating other engineers
• Determine technical tasks for engineers
• Improve existing structures, processes, and engineering standards
• Reconcile competing priorities to identify optimal solutions
• Lead engineering efforts and team-level processes
• Provide technical advice to senior leaders on systems, solutions, challenges, and strategy
• Own design, implementation, and operational excellence of software components
• Contribute to the technical engineering roadmap through implementation assessments and recommendations
• Provide technical leadership for a small team
• Design, estimate, and implement secure, reliable, scalable software services
• Deliver high-quality code on time while following the SDLC process
• Own service performance and availability
• Participate in on-call rotations and provide incident support
• Represent PayPal to partners, customers, and industry organizations

Skills

Project Leadership

Mentoring Engineering Staff

Relationship Management

Distributed Services Knowledge

Python Programming

Cloud Services Knowledge

Leadership Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Master's degree in CS or related field

Tools

Terraform

Redis

ElastiCache

Hazelcast

SQS

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Pulsar

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

• Act as a project or system leader, coordinating other engineers
• Determine technical tasks for engineers
• Improve existing structures, processes, and engineering standards
• Reconcile competing priorities to identify optimal solutions
• Lead engineering efforts and team-level processes
• Provide technical advice to senior leaders on systems, solutions, challenges, and strategy
• Own design, implementation, and operational excellence of software components
• Contribute to the technical engineering roadmap through implementation assessments and recommendations
• Provide technical leadership for a small team
• Design, estimate, and implement secure, reliable, scalable software services
• Deliver high-quality code on time while following the SDLC process
• Own service performance and availability
• Participate in on-call rotations and provide incident support
• Represent PayPal to partners, customers, and industry organizations

Requirements

• 5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree OR any equivalent combination of education and experience
• Bachelor's and/or Master's in computer science, or a related field of study, or equivalent experience
• 8+ years' experience with Python or equivalent high-level programming language
• Advanced skills with RDBMS and NoSQL data stores
• Experience with caching solutions such as Redis, ElastiCache, or Hazelcast
• Experience with messaging/queuing systems such as SQS, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Pulsar
• Ability to lead projects and mentor all levels of engineering staff
• Ability to manage relationships with Product, Engineering Operations, and non-technical business and support teams
• Expert knowledge of distributed services and backend systems
• Expertise building services on public cloud, preferably AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Experience managing infrastructure as code using Terraform
• Experience working with fault-tolerant and scalable distributed services and systems

Core Competencies

Demonstrates expertise in leading engineering teams and projects, with a strong focus on designing and implementing scalable software services. Proficient in managing relationships across technical and non-technical teams while ensuring operational excellence and adherence to engineering standards.

Highest-signal resume keywords

• Python Programming
• RDBMS and NoSQL Expertise
• Cloud Services (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
• Distributed Services Knowledge

Hard Skills

• Software Design
• Implementation Excellence
• SDLC Process
• Caching Solutions (Redis, ElastiCache, Hazelcast)
• Messaging Systems (SQS, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pulsar)

Soft Skills

• Project Leadership
• Mentoring Engineering Staff
• Relationship Management

Industry Keywords

• Operational Excellence
• Incident Support
• Technical Leadership
• Engineering Standards
• Scalable Systems