Staff Software Engineering

Job Summary:Project leader coordinating activities of other engineers, determining technical tasks, improving existing structures and processes, making technical decisions, collaborating with management, representing the company to external partners, and exercising judgment in reconciling diverse priorities.Responsibilities:Act as a project or system leader, coordinating activities of other engineers on the project or within the system.Determine the technical tasks that other engineers will follow.Achieve customer, operational, program, or service objectives.Proactively improve existing structures and processes.Exercise judgment in reconciling diverse and competing priorities (time, quality, complexity risk) to identify optimal solutions.Notice patterns and condense repetition into densely meaningful generalized solutions.Collaborate with management to set/improve standards for engineering rigor.Represent PayPal to external partners, customers, or industry organizations.Minimum Qualifications:5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education and experience.Preferred Qualifications:10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years building and scaling backend distributed systems.Expert-level proficiency in Java, Spring, and Microservices with deep understanding of JVM internals, concurrency models, memory management, and performance optimization.Proven experience architecting and deploying microservices architectures in cloud-native environments, especially GCP (AWS experience also valued).Strong expertise with designing RESTful APIs, caching, data modeling, partitioning strategies, and query optimization.Hands-on experience with message streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka and Google Pub/Sub for event-driven architectures.Define and maintain team coding guidelines for Java, microservices design, API contracts, and database interactions.Design and operate systems handling high-throughput, low-latency workloads (100k+ transactions per second).Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude).Lead architectural decisions and technical strategy across multiple engineering teams.Serve as the primary technical authority for system design, establishing patterns and best practices.Drive cross-functional collaboration with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Risk, Payments and Compliance teams.Champion API strategy development and execution, ensuring alignment with product roadmaps and business objectives.Mentor engineers through comprehensive code reviews, maintaining high-quality standards and promoting engineering excellence.Operational Excellence:Participate in on-call rotations, leading incident response and driving resolution for critical production issues.Design for reliability, scalability, and performance across distributed systems.Oversee the development and optimization of API endpoints to meet stringent SLA requirements.Implement observability and monitoring solutions to maintain system health and performance.Compensation & Benefits:Base pay depends on location and experience. Expected range for San Jose, California: $176,500.00 – $262,350.00 annually.Additional compensation may include an annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation as applicable.Work model: 3 days in office and 2 days at a chosen location (office or home).Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion:PayPal provides equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, public assistance status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. PayPal will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.J-18808-Ljbffr