Staff Engineer - API Lead, Digital Wallet

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:

This job acts as a project leader, coordinating the activities of other engineers, determining technical tasks, and improving existing structures and processes. It involves making technical decisions, collaborating with management to set standards, and representing the company to external partners.

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

Minimum Qualifications:

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

Preferred Qualification:

Join a small, high-impact team of engineers and product managers on a mission to redefine global commerce. We are building the next generation of Digital Wallet infrastructure to enable cross-border payments, drive financial inclusion, and power seamless commerce experiences worldwide.

Your Impact:

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer in our payments engineering team, you will play a pivotal role in designing and building scalable, secure, and highly available systems that support real-time transaction processing, digital wallet integrations, and global money movement. You will be the technical go-to person for architecture, design, and deep system-level troubleshooting across our payment platform.

Your Day-to-Day:

• Lead major initiatives to design, develop, and optimize large-scale distributed systems for wallet-based payments and cross-border transactions.
• Architect and build core platform components using TypeScript, Node.js, and AWS-native services with a strong focus on performance, observability, and fault tolerance.
• Design APIs (REST & GraphQL) and real-time processing workflows that integrate with internal and external wallet providers.
• Drive best practices in cloud-native architecture leveraging AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, Kinesis, Step Functions, and EventBridge.
• Mentor and pair-program with engineers to raise the bar for code quality, operational excellence, and system design.
• Collaborate closely with product, compliance, and partner integration teams to deliver seamless and reliable payment experiences.
• Implement observability, monitoring, and alerting to ensure end-to-end reliability and proactive incident response.
• Participate in on-call rotations and support production systems with a focus on minimizing downtime and user impact.
• Continuously evaluate and improve system performance using metrics and real-world transaction data.

What You Bring:

• 14+ years of experience in software engineering with a proven track record in financial systems, payments, or digital wallets.
• Deep hands-on experience building resilient backend services and transaction processing pipelines on AWS Cloud.
• Desired proficiency in TypeScript and strong command of Java and at least one scripting language (e.g., Python, Shell).
• Experience with event-driven architectures, messaging systems (Kafka, SQS/SNS), and distributed data processing.
• Strong SQL and data modeling skills with experience in MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redshift, or similar databases.
• Proficient in infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform and/or CloudFormation.
• Demonstrated success building and scaling mission-critical APIs, real-time services, and batch workflows.
• Prior experience in payments, FX handling, ledger systems, or settlement workflows is a strong plus.
• Passion for clean code, robust testing, and secure design practices.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across engineering, product, and partner-facing teams.
• A mindset focused on customer impact, agility, and continuous improvement.