PayPal Principal Software Engineer – Developer Experience Architect 

United States, Illinois, Chicago 

229401277

Architecture LeadershipSet architectural standards and best practices for developer-facing systems with a focus on scalability, performance, and usability.Lead the design of intelligent developer workflows powered by LLMs and agentic AI systems.Strategic Vision & InnovationShape the long-term technology roadmap for AI-enabled documentation, contextual onboarding, and smart sandboxing.Evaluate and drive adoption of modern developer tooling, frameworks, and low-code/no-code platforms.Serve as a key technical voice in initiatives that span 200+ engineers across platform and product teams.Mentorship & Thought LeadershipProvide technical mentorship to senior and staff engineers across the DevEx organization.Contribute to design reviews, architecture forums, and engineering-wide technical strategy discussions.Promote engineering excellence, security-by-design, and developer empathy across the organization.

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.

• Proven ability to architect and deliver scalable developer platforms and tools in a large-scale enterprise.

• Deep experience in API design, developer portalarchitectures, SDK lifecycle management, and CI/CD pipelines.

• Strong understanding of LLMs, AI-assisted developer experiences, and agentic workflow design.

• Familiarity with no-code/low-code platforms, plug-in frameworks, and developer onboarding patterns.

• Exceptional technical communication, design thinking, and cross-functional influence.

• Experience with open-source developer platforms, standards, or contribution to API ecosystems.

• Hands-on experience with integrating AI/ML into product features—especially those that serve developers.

• Knowledge ofGraphQL, RESTful APIs, webhooks, SDK generation, and OpenAPI/AsyncAPIspecs.

• Experience in developer advocacy, product-minded engineering, or working directly with API consumers.

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