Sr Staff Software Engineer

This role is critical in shaping how PayPal approaches fraud prevention at scale. You will build solutions to expose complex fraud and risk patterns across platforms, design solutions that span multiple systems, and products that empower merchants to mitigate risk in ways that best align with their business needs. As a Senior Staff Engineer, you'll be a key technical leader driving innovation in risk detection and prevention, influencing core architecture and technical strategy.

Essential Responsibilities:

• Makes technical decisions affecting multiple teams, crossing organizational boundaries
• Establishes conventions & processes to be followed by other employees
• Actions determine the utilization of company resources (people, money, assets) and affect the effectiveness of the company
• Handles multiple, multi-team initiatives simultaneously, using judgement to prioritize among more issues than can be handled individually.
• Understands evolving industry capabilities & practices and can judiciously apply up-to-date information for optimal results
• Competent at communicating technical issues with non-technical audiences
• Spreads their behavior, principles, and knowledge as a means of improving technical results of other employees (via many means modeling behavior, 1:1s, working sessions, quality documentation)
• Partners with product management, to ideate solutions to business problems & goals

Minimum Qualifications:

• Minimum of 12 years of relevant work experience and a Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

Meet our team:

Risk as a Service (RaaS) team is at the forefront of designing, developing, and shipping a wide range of products for transaction and payments risk detection and mitigation for PayPal merchants. We provide a holistic, end-to-end fraud and decision-making platform to empower businesses battling to contain fraud in a digital-first world. We build various powerful, highly usable platforms and services which enable organizations to make data-driven decisions and grow faster. Our range of products helps provide businesses with the flexibility to adapt as fraud evolves, ensuring that our merchants always have the information they need to make the right decisions.

Your way to impact:

As Sr. Staff Software Engineer, you will be responsible for shaping the strategy, development, and execution for our Risk as a Service product offering. You will lead initiatives and participate in all phases of our software development lifecycle from design, architecture and planning to development, testing, deployment, monitoring and beyond. This role requires deep expertise in developing scalable and reliable software capable of handling large volumes of data/requests efficiently. The successful candidate should have a proven track record of architecting, implementing, and maintaining robust software systems that can operate smoothly under demanding workloads while ensuring minimal downtime and high performance.

What do you need to bring:

• Deep expertise in Java with extensive experience in Spring Framework and Spring Boot for building large-scale, mission-critical services.
• Strong knowledge of service-oriented architectures, including REST/JSON and gRPC, with a track record of designing robust, high-performance APIs.
• Hands-on proficiency with both relational databases (e.g., Oracle) and distributed, non-relational systems (e.g., Aerospike, Redis) at scale.
• Solid foundation in Linux environments, including ability to write scripts and automate workflows to improve system efficiency.
• Expertise in object-oriented programming, coupled with deep understanding of algorithms, data structures, and design patterns for building resilient systems.
• Strong experience with containers (Docker/Kubernetes), modern cloud platforms, and DevOps practices for continuous delivery and operations.
• Demonstrated ability to architect, build, and optimize highly available, low-latency, and scalable systems in production.
• Proven track record of technical leadership and cross-functional collaboration with globally distributed engineering teams.
• Excellent problem-solving and systems-thinking mindset with a focus on execution and delivery.
• Experience in the financial services or payments industry is a strong plus.

We know the confidence gap and imposter syndrome can get in the way of meeting spectacular candidates. Please don't hesitate to apply.