Principal Engineer, Cloud Data Infrastructure

The Company
PayPal has been revolutionizing commerce globally for more than 25 years. Creating innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, PayPal empowers consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy.
We operate a global, two-sided network at scale that connects hundreds of millions of merchants and consumers. We help merchants and consumers connect, transact, and complete payments, whether they are online or in person. PayPal is more than a connection to third-party payment networks. We provide proprietary payment solutions accepted by merchants that enable the completion of payments on our platform on behalf of our customers.
We offer our customers the flexibility to use their accounts to purchase and receive payments for goods and services, as well as the ability to transfer and withdraw funds. We enable consumers to exchange funds more safely with merchants using a variety of funding sources, which may include a bank account, a PayPal or Venmo account balance, PayPal and Venmo branded credit products, a credit card, a debit card, certain cryptocurrencies, or other stored value products such as gift cards, and eligible credit card rewards. Our PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom products also make it safer and simpler for friends and family to transfer funds to each other. We offer merchants an end-to-end payments solution that provides authorization and settlement capabilities, as well as instant access to funds and payouts. We also help merchants connect with their customers, process exchanges and returns, and manage risk. We enable consumers to engage in cross-border shopping and merchants to extend their global reach while reducing the complexity and friction involved in enabling cross-border trade.
Our beliefs are the foundation for how we conduct business every day. We live each day guided by our core values of Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, and Wellness. Together, our values ensure that we work together as one global team with our customers at the center of everything we do – and they push us to ensure we take care of ourselves, each other, and our communities.
Job Summary:
This role is the technical authority for Venmo’s data platform infrastructure and performance engineering. The Principal Engineer sets the technology vision, defines architectural direction, and provides deep technical leadership for the teams responsible for mission-critical databases, data pipelines, messaging systems, caching infrastructure, and performance engineering powering Venmo’s real-time payment processing at massive scale. This is a deeply hands-on individual contributor role with broad organizational influence — you will stay close to the code and systems, own technical strategy, pioneer AI-first engineering practices, and mentor the Venmo data platform engineering community. You will also serve as the primary technical voice in cross-functional and executive-level conversations.
Job Description:
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:
10+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications:
Expected Qualifications
15+ years of professional experience in software engineering or data platform roles, with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
5+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production cloud environments (AWS preferred).
Deep, hands-on technical expertise across data and messaging systems — relational and NoSQL databases, distributed caching, and message queue architectures; you can get into the internals when needed.
Strong DevOps engineering background including infrastructure as code, CI/CD for data systems, and automation-first operational practices.
Demonstrated experience with AI-first development practices and the ability to apply AI tooling to accelerate engineering productivity.
Demonstrated track record delivering performance improvements and scalability enhancements for consumer-facing applications serving tens of millions of users.
Established record of technical influence across large engineering organizations without direct management authority.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to present complex technical trade-offs to executive stakeholders.
Additional & Preferred Qualifications
Background in financial technology, payments processing, or regulated industries.
Experience supporting transaction processing systems requiring extreme reliability and millisecond-level response times.
Familiarity with resilience engineering, failure injection testing, and business continuity planning.
Knowledge of modern data pipeline frameworks and real-time analytics architectures.
History of mentoring and growing senior/staff-level engineers into technical leadership roles.
Experience integrating AI/ML workflows into data platform infrastructure including vector databases, feature stores, or LLM serving infrastructure.
Subsidiary:
Venmo
Travel Percent:
0
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The base pay for this role will depend on where you work and the relevant experience and expertise you bring. The expected range of pay for this role by location is:

Primary Location | Pay Range:
San Jose, California: ($218,000.00 - $323,950.00 Annually)

Additional Location(s) | Pay Range:
Austin, Texas: ($198,000.00 - $294,250.00 Annually)

Additional compensation for this role may include an annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation, as applicable.
PayPal does not charge candidates any fees for courses, applications, resume reviews, interviews, background checks, or onboarding. When making an application directly, we will never ask you to share passwords, one-time passcodes (OTP), or verification codes. Any such request is a red flag and likely part of a scam. All communication regarding your application will come from official PayPal email domains. If you suspect fraudulent activity, please report it immediately. To lear