Staff Software Engineer - Python

The Company

PayPal has been revolutionizing commerce globally for more than 25 years. Creating innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, PayPal empowers consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy.

We operate a global, two-sided network at scale that connects hundreds of millions of merchants and consumers. We help merchants and consumers connect, transact, and complete payments, whether they are online or in person. PayPal is more than a connection to third-party payment networks. We provide proprietary payment solutions accepted by merchants that enable the completion of payments on our platform on behalf of our customers.

We offer our customers the flexibility to use their accounts to purchase and receive payments for goods and services, as well as the ability to transfer and withdraw funds. We enable consumers to exchange funds more safely with merchants using a variety of funding sources, which may include a bank account, a PayPal or Venmo account balance, PayPal and Venmo branded credit products, a credit card, a debit card, certain cryptocurrencies, or other stored value products such as gift cards, and eligible credit card rewards. Our PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom products also make it safer and simpler for friends and family to transfer funds to each other. We offer merchants an end-to-end payments solution that provides authorization and settlement capabilities, as well as instant access to funds and payouts. We also help merchants connect with their customers, process exchanges and returns, and manage risk. We enable consumers to engage in cross-border shopping and merchants to extend their global reach while reducing the complexity and friction involved in enabling cross-border trade.

Our beliefs are the foundation for how we conduct business every day. We live each day guided by our core values of Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, and Wellness. Together, our values ensure that we work together as one global team with our customers at the center of everything we do – and they push us to ensure we take care of ourselves, each other, and our communities.

Job Summary:

What you need to know about the role

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a subject matter expert. We are looking for technologists with the highest levels of technical talent, programming, and communication skills with a keen desire to deeply understand our product and how to make our systems more robust and more resilient.

Meet our team

Engineering is a craft, and at Venmo we want the internals of our software to be as elegant as the end user experience we are designing. We spend our days scaling our payment backend services and building new features to meet and exceed our user’s needs and wants. We teach and learn from one another and push each other to be at our creative and analytical best. We work to push our technology forward with respect to functionality, performance, reliability and scalability

Job Description:

Essential Responsibilities:

• Acts as a project or system leader, coordinating the activities of other engineers on the project or within the system
• Determines the technical tasks that other engineers will follow
• Actions result in the achievement of customer, operational, program or service objectives
• Proactively improves existing structures & processes
• Exercises judgement in reconciling diverse and competing priorities (time, quality, complexity risk) to identify optimal solutions to problems
• Notices patterns and condenses repetition into densely meaningful generalized solutions
• Collaborates with management to set/improve standards for engineering rigor
• Trusted to represent PayPal, Inc to the outside world via interactions with partners, customers, or industry organizations

Expected Qualifications:

• Minimum of 8 years of relevant work experience and a Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualification:

Your way to impact

As a Staff software engineer for Venmo Payments Engineering you will act as a senior engineer and subject matter expert for the Payments Engineering team. You will have the opportunity to work on one of the biggest payments platforms that caters to 65 million active users and processes transactions worth billion of dollars. Given all the fun challenges, we are a fast-paced organization going through rapid growth that is solving technical challenges at exponential scale. As an organization, we have a strong culture of committing to goals and delivering on timelines.

Your day to day

In your day to day role you will

• Lead engineering efforts and team level processes by defining outcomes for others, refining ongoing processes, and providing technical advice to senior leaders on systems, solutions, challenges, and strategy.
• Support end-to-end ownership of design, implementation and operational excellence of software components while proactively improving existing structures and processes.
• Contribute to the technical engineering roadmap by completing quality and thorough assessments of implementation alternatives and their associated trade-offs and providing recommendations.
• Provides technical leadership for a small team with minimum guidance from management or senior teammates.
• Design, estimate and implement new and refactored software services on the platform securely, reliably and at scale. Take ownership of quality of design and implementation of software components.
• Deliver high quality code on time and follow our SDLC process.
• Own the performance and availability of the services as well as participate in on call rotations and provide support during incidences.
• Have an appetite to learn and contribute to complex projects alongside your colleagues.

What do you need to bring

• Bachelor’s and/or Masters 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, caching solutions (e.g. Redis, ElastiCache, Hazelcast) and messaging/queuing protocols/systems such as SQS/Kafka/RabbitMQ/Pulsar
• Ability to lead projects and mentor all levels of engineering staff, along with managing relationships with Product, Engineering Operations and non-technical business and support teams
• Expert with distributed services and backend systems
• Expertise with building services on public cloud – preferably AWS or GCP, Azure
• Experience in managing infrastructure as code using Terraform
• Experience working with fault-tolerant and scalable distributed services and systems.