PayPal Staff Engineer - API Lead Digital Wallet 

United States, California, San Jose 

422417230

This job acts as a project leader, coordinating the activities of other engineers, determining technical tasks, and improving existing structures and processes. It involves making technical decisions, collaborating with management to set standards, and representing the company to external partners.

Essential Responsibilities:

• 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 judgement 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 PayPal, Inc to the outside world via interactions with partners, customers, or industry organizations

Minimum Qualifications:

• Minimum of 8 years of relevant work experience and a Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer in our payments engineering team, you will play a pivotal role in designing and building scalable, secure, and highly available systems that support real-time transaction processing, digital wallet integrations, and global money movement. You will be the technical go-to person for architecture, design, and deep system-level troubleshooting across our payment platform.Your Day-to-Day:

• Lead major initiatives to design, develop, and optimize large-scale distributed systems for wallet-based payments and cross-border transactions.
• Architect and build core platform components using TypeScript, Node.js, and AWS-native services with a strong focus on performance, observability, and fault tolerance.
• Design APIs (REST & GraphQL) and real-time processing workflows that integrate with internal and external wallet providers.
• Drive best practices in cloud-native architecture leveraging AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, Kinesis, Step Functions, and EventBridge.
• Mentor and pair-program with engineers to raise the bar for code quality, operational excellence, and system design.
• Collaborate closely with product, compliance, and partner integration teams to deliver seamless and reliable payment experiences.
• Implement observability, monitoring, and alerting to ensure end-to-end reliability and proactive incident response.
• Participate in on-call rotations and support production systems with a focus on minimizing downtime and user impact.
• Continuously evaluate and improve system performance using metrics and real-world transaction data.

What You Bring:

• 14+ years of experience in software engineering with a proven track record in financial systems, payments, or digital wallets.
• Deep hands-on experience building resilient backend services and transaction processing pipelines on AWS Cloud.
• Desired proficiency in TypeScript and strong command of Java and at least one scripting language (e.g., Python, Shell).
• Experience with event-driven architectures, messaging systems (Kafka, SQS/SNS), and distributed data processing.
• Strong SQL and data modeling skills with experience in MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redshift, or similar databases.
• Proficient ininfrastructure-as-codetools like Terraform and/or CloudFormation.
• Demonstrated success building and scaling mission-critical APIs, real-time services, and batch workflows.
• Prior experience in payments, FX handling, ledger systems, or settlement workflows is a strong plus.
• Passion for clean code, robust testing, and secure design practices.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across engineering, product, and partner-facing teams.
• A mindset focused on customer impact, agility, and continuous improvement.

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 $152,500 to $262,350

Our Benefits:

Any general requests for consideration of your skills, please