PayPal Tech Infra Lead Architect 

United States, Arizona, Scottsdale 

21298020

Strategy & Planning

• Define and maintain the Long-Term Architecture (LTA) in alignment with Enterprise Architecture.
• Ensure strategic and roadmap alignment across Tech Infrastructure domains, including SRE, DPE, Infra, Cloud, and China.
• Manage technical debt and system evolution strategies, ensuring long-term sustainability and efficiency.
• Evaluate and guide technology investment decisions, favoring industry-standard solutions (COTS/open-source) over bespoke development.
• Partner with leadership to influence organizational structure and execution strategy, applying Conway’s Law to optimize system design and team alignment.

Technical Architecture

• Ensure technical representation and alignment of Tech Infrastructure domain(s) with Enterprise Architecture.
• Develop and maintain architectural blueprints, standards, and system interaction patterns.
• Design and validate scalable integration patterns between different systems.
• Lead the design and evaluation of major architectural investments, such as service mesh implementations.
• Ensure that all architectural designs prioritize reliability, scalability, maintainability, observability, monitoring, and security.

Technical Leadership

• Lead/Contribute to the Infrastructure Architecture Forum to review and approve High-Level Designs (HLDs) and Architectural Decision Records (ADRs).
• Provide technical leadership for strategic, cross-functional programs.
• Support senior leaders in the organization in solving complex challenges process, people, technology challenges.
• Participate in post mortem Root Cause Analyses (RCAs) and ensure corrective actions are holistic, addressing actual root causes while feeding insights into the LTA.
• Facilitate cross-functional collaboration across teams to drive efficiency and prevent duplicate efforts.
• Mentor teams on architectural principles and best practices, ensuring a strong engineering culture.
• Translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable insights for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in development, infrastructure, or cloud architecture roles.
• Strong understanding of systems design, enterprise architecture, distributed systems, and large-scale infrastructure.
• Experience with modern cloud-native architectures, and scalable integration patterns.
• Ability to drive technical strategy, governance, and architectural decision-making.
• Excellent problem-solving skills, especially in high-availability and mission-critical environments.
• Strong leadership, communication, and stakeholder management abilities.
• Experience with incident management, RCA processes, and technical debt management.

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 U.S. national annual pay range for this role is

$107300 to $259600

Our Benefits:

Any general requests for consideration of your skills, please