PayPal Principal Software Engineer SMB & FS 

France, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes 

683749950

Own the technical vision and execution for platforms powering SMBs such as merchant payments, settlement & reconciliation, payouts, merchant services and developer experiences,lending, and embedded finance. Lead the multi‑year evolution from on‑prem to cloud‑native architectures. Architect AI‑native commerce

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

Expected Qualifications:

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

• Additional Responsibilities:
  • Own the multi‑year architecture and migration strategy moving SMB & FS platforms from on‑prem to cloud‑native; define milestones, re-architect for cloud-native, and land secure, compliant, highly available services.
  • Define platform standards (APIs, contracts, versioning, idempotency, SLOs, operational readiness) that unify payments, risk, onboarding, settlement, reconciliation, payouts, and capital experiences.
  • Partner with product, risk, compliance, data, and finance to align technical choices to business outcomes; translate complex trade‑offs into clear, executive‑ready decisions.
  • Grow Staff+ engineering capability: lead architecture reviews, create reusable frameworks and reference designs, and raise the quality bar across multiple teams.
• Preferred Qualifications:
  • Track record designing and shipping large‑scale, low‑latency distributed systems in payments/fintech or similarly regulated, high‑availability domains.
  • Led cloud migrations of mission‑critical systems to cloud (GCP expertise a plus); depth in container orchestration, service mesh,infrastructure‑as‑code,and automated delivery.
  • Hands‑on experience building and operating production AI/ML-powered capabilities for commerce.
  • Deep understanding of the merchant payments stack:acquiring/facilitation,tokenization, checkout,authorization/capture,disputes/chargebacks,settlement & reconciliation, payouts.
  • Strong security and compliance background (PCI DSS, SOC2, PSD2/SCA); experience architecting for auditability, explainability, and controls.
  • Expertise in event‑driven architecture and data platforms (e.g., Kafka/Pub/Sub, stream processing, feature stores, real‑time analytics) supporting decisioning at scale.
  • Exceptional written and verbal influence across org boundaries and up to C‑suite; crisp design docs and decision records that drive alignment.
  • Proven mentorship of Staff/Principal engineers and effectiveness establishing technical standards and communities of practice.
  • API platform experience (REST/gRPC/GraphQL),SDK/developer‑experiencemindset, and a bias for cost‑aware, operable designs (FinOps).

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