PayPal Principal Software Engineer 

United States, California, San Jose 

143891405

Essential Responsibilities:

• Increases results & effectiveness of all software engineers in a large domain
• Sets the technology roadmap for a domain
• Adapts their role to the need, selecting the most effective means of realizing their technical goals
• Provides advice and counsel to senior executives within PayPal, influencing the development of multi-year business strategies
• Exercises wide latitude in determining objectives and approaches to assignments and takes initiative to achieve results
• Handles ambiguous and unfamiliar situations and uses creativity to deliver decisive resolutions
• Uses discovery & exploratory research, not being limited to technical domains, to make successful decisions
• Identifies themes & trends that span projects and teams, and finds broadly impactful opportunities for improvement
• Uses professional savvy to determine when industry-standard solutions can be adopted, versus when a problem space warrants a novel solution (“build/buy”)
• Mentor others as a means of propagating technical influence, and to enhance the performance of their organization

Minimum Qualifications:

• Minimum of 15 years of relevant work experience and a Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

Technical Leadership:

• Champion developer-centric practices across PayPal’s engineering organization while managing technical debt related to CI/CD, test environments, and developer portals
• Serve as a thought leader advocating for engineering best practices for Developer Platforms.
• Guide the team in architecture reviews, including High-Level Designs (HLDs) and Architectural Decision Records (ADRs).
• Guide teams dealing with incident management, RCA processes, and overarching developer ecosystem strategies.
• Partner with the DevOps Leadership team and engineers to foster collaboration, eliminate inefficiencies, and reduce duplicate efforts.
• Mentor teams on scalable development strategies and foster a culture of engineering excellence and innovation.
• Distill complex technical concepts into clear, actionable insights for stakeholders across technical and non-technical domains.

Domain Leadership:

• Drive enhancements in CI/CD environments with tools like Harness (current), Jenkins (legacy), GitHub EMU, and JFROG Artifactory.
• Build and enhance internal developer portals, consolidating workflows and orchestrating developer environments such as staging and sandbox layers.
• Explore AI and ML-enabled technologies for code analysis, test automation, and developer productivity insights.

Qualifications:

• 12+ years of experience in development, infrastructure, or cloud architecture roles, with at least 5 years focused on Developer Platforms or Developer Productivity Engineering.
• Strong understanding of systems design, enterprise architecture principles, distributed systems, and developer-centric environments.
• Proven experience with modern CI/CD architectures, developer environment tooling, and internal developer platform solutions like Harness, Jenkins, and GitHub EMU.
• Experience with developer environments such as test and staging systems, load balancing strategies, and monitoring systems for developer success.
• Ability to drive technical strategy, governance frameworks, and architectural decision-making with a focus on developer productivity.
• Strong problem-solving skills, particularly in high-availability and mission-critical environments.
• Exceptional leadership, communication, and stakeholder management abilities.
• Familiarity with AI capabilities to augment developer platforms and productivity strategies is a plus.

Travel Percent:

The total compensation for this practice may include an annual performance bonus (or other incentive compensation, as applicable), equity, and medical, dental, vision, and other benefits. For more information, visit .

The US national annual pay range for this role is $188,000 to $323,950

Our Benefits:

Any general requests for consideration of your skills, please