PayPal is seeking a Senior Staff Backend Engineer (Python) to shape the architecture, scalability, and evolution of systems that power millions of secure global transactions every day. The role aims to drive innovation, reliability, and performance across platforms to ensure PayPal continues to deliver trusted, high-quality experiences for customers worldwide.
Requirements
- 8+ years architecting, building, and operating cloud-native, distributed systems at meaningful scale
- Track record of raising the engineering bar through design standards, automated quality gates, SLO ownership, and a culture of blameless post-mortems
- Hands-on experience applying machine-learning or large-language-model techniques for personalization, risk, search, or developer productivity; ready to lead our adoption of AI-assisted development and LLM-powered product features
- Deep understanding of service design, data modeling, asynchronous messaging, and API craftsmanship, with a privacy-by-design approach
- Explain complex trade-offs in plain language and help seasoned engineers grow through candid feedback and sponsorship
- Able to align product, design, and compliance partners around a technical vision and rally other teams to deliver on it
- You prototype rapidly, run A/B tests, and turn promising spikes into reliable production services
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 (people, money, assets) and affect the effectiveness of the company
- Handles multiple, multi-team initiatives simultaneously, using judgment to prioritize among more issues than can be handled individually
- Understands evolving industry capabilities & practices and can judiciously apply up-to-date information for optimal results
- Competent at communicating technical issues with non-technical audiences
- Spreads their behavior, principles, and knowledge as a means of improving technical results of other employees (via many means – modeling behavior, 1:1s, working sessions, quality documentation)
Other
- 8+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience
- For the majority of employees, PayPal's balanced hybrid work model offers 3 days in the office and 2 days remote
- PayPal does not charge candidates any fees for courses, applications, resume reviews, interviews, background checks, or onboarding
- Candidates must be able to work in the U.S. and meet any applicable visa or work authorization requirements
- Ability to collaborate effectively across product, design, and compliance teams
