Software Engineer, Backend Developer, Cloud Engineer - Software

Job Summary

We’re seeking an exceptional Staff Engineer to lead our backend engineering efforts on the Venmo Risk team s role acts as a project leader, coordinating the activities of other engineers, determining technical tasks, and continuously improving existing structures and processes. You’ll make critical technical decisions, collaborate with management to establish engineering standards, and represent Pay Pal to external partners and vendors.

• 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 judgment 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 Pay Pal, Inc to the outside world via interactions with partners, customers, or industry organizations

• 5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years building and scaling backend distributed systems in production
• 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, particularly Google Cloud Platform (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 by working thru matrix org.
• Demonstrated success designing and operating systems handling high‑throughput, low‑latency workloads (100k+ transactions per second)
• Familiarity with AI‑assisted development tools (e.g., Git Hub Copilot, Claude) for code generation, testing, and documentation.

• 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

• 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, ensuring they meet stringent SLA requirements
• Implement observability and monitoring solutions to maintain system health and performance

Pay Pal offers a comprehensive benefits package that includes generous paid time off, healthcare coverage for employees and their families, and resources to support financial security and mental health. A flexible, balanced work culture promotes well‑being and professional growth.

Pay Pal provides equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. Pay Pal will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.