Director – Intelligent Routing & Platform Infrastructure

Pay Pal is a global payments platform that enables merchants and consumers to transact with ease across more than 200 markets. It delivers secure, personalized, and scalable payment solutions for both online and in‑person commerce.

Pay Pal moves money for hundreds of millions of people and businesses worldwide. This role leads the intelligent fabric that routes, secures, and scales every transaction and API call across our global platform. As a transformation leader, you will own our intelligent routing services, Kubernetes fleet management, and IaaS platforms and set a new standard for how these systems are built, operated, and evolved.

• Directs and controls the delivery of business and technical outcomes that comprise multiple projects and operational activities within a domain through organizational and technical leadership.
• Defines engineering health objectives that drive organization health, engineering best practices, and operational targets.
• Drives product and technical strategy with cross‑functional leaders across the enterprise to deliver domain goals.
• Responsible for the delivery of programs, establishing annual organizational goals and ensuring performance and results that impact both their domain and potentially enterprise.
• Develops engineering strategy that translates into operational and tactical plans; uses ground‑breaking methods to think beyond existing solutions.
• Sets the tri‑annual roadmap for a domain level organization; defines the operational strategy for a domain based on a defined budget.
• Evaluates key business challenges and can complete complex, ambiguous initiatives having impact across engineering; directs the development of new or innovative solutions. Ability to deal with high levels of technical domain level ambiguity.
• Collaborates with direct team, managers in org, stakeholders, managers in other orgs, external partners and business stakeholders.

• 10+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 2 years of experience leading others.

• Own the strategy, architecture, and execution for Service Mesh (Istio or equivalent) and API Gateway (Kgateway or equivalent) platforms serving Pay Pal’s microservices and cloud‑native ecosystem.
• Drive adoption of advanced traffic management capabilities: fine‑grained routing policies, circuit breaking, mutual TLS, observability instrumentation, and progressive delivery patterns (canary, blue/green, A/B).
• Partner with Security, Reliability, and Product Engineering teams to embed security, compliance, and resilience primitives directly into the routing layer — making safe behaviour the default, not the exception.

• Lead the engineering teams managing Pay Pal’s multi‑cluster, multi‑region Kubernetes fleet at one of the largest private Kubernetes deployments in the world.
• Own the full lifecycle: cluster provisioning, upgrades, node pool management, workload placement policies, autoscaling, resource governance, and decommissioning.
• Define and enforce fleet‑wide standards for cluster hardening, RBAC models, admission control, and policy enforcement via tools like OPA/Gatekeeper or Kyverno.
• Drive a platform‑as‑a‑product mindset — engineering teams that consume the platform should experience it as a force multiplier, not a bottleneck.

• Own the engineering and roadmap for compute provisioning platforms (bare metal, VM, containerized) supporting Pay Pal’s private and hybrid cloud infrastructure.
• Drive the design of traffic management systems including global load balancing, anycast routing, DNS‑based traffic steering, and edge ingress architecture.
• Build programmatic, API‑first infrastructure surfaces that enable engineering teams to self‑serve confidently, with guardrails baked in.

• Raise the engineering bar relentlessly. Define what "excellent" looks like across your domains — from design reviews to incident response to capacity planning — and hold your teams and peers to it.
• Drive from…