Sr Staff Software Engineer, AI Innovation at PayPal in San Jose, CA

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: Join AI Growth & Innovation, where you take emerging AI from zero to N - building and enhancing agentic systems, real-time voice, and multimodal experiences directly in production with real customers. As a Senior Staff Engineer, you'll turn ambiguous problems and emerging tech into a point of view, then prototype fast to prove or disprove hypotheses and scale what works into reliable, secure products. You'll own high-visibility bets end-to-end, from research through production. Day to day: research new models and frameworks, launch experiments with safe-rollout practices, track metrics like quality, latency, cost, and impact, and extend our agent platform's orchestration, tool use, and evaluation. You will be someone who moves beyond established playbooks, builds scrappy prototypes to test reality fast, and partners with product, design, and engineering to turn validated ideas into platform capabilities.

Job Description:

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:

• 8+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.

Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications:

Required Qualifications

• Senior or staff-level engineering experience, with impact beyond your own code
• A track record of shipping to real users and scaling early ideas into reliable, secure, cost-efficient products
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs or agentic systems, at work, in a startup, or on serious independent projects
• A bias toward fast, scrappy prototyping: given an ambiguous problem, you'd rather build a rough version and test it against reality than debate it on paper first
• Comfort with ambiguity and strong research instincts: you learn fast, design quick experiments to prove or disprove a hypothesis, and apply what you learn without waiting for a settled playbook
• Drive and ownership: you take on stretch problems, go beyond your scope, and follow through until it ships
• Strong engineering fundamentals in at least one modern language
• Clear communication with engineers and executives

Preferred Qualifications

• Real-time voice or multimodal experience
• Automated evaluation and observability for AI systems
• Deep knowledge on model fine-tuning, trade-offs, and when to use it

Subsidiary: PayPal

Travel Percent: 0

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: ($196,500.00 - $291,500.00 Annually)

Additional Location(s) | Pay Range: No other locations are assigned to this requisition currently.

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 learn more about how to identify and avoid recruitment fraud please visit https://careers.pypl.com/contact-us.

For the majority of employees, PayPal's balanced hybrid work model offers 3 days in the office for effective in-person collaboration and 2 days at your choice of either the PayPal office or your home workspace, ensuring that you equally have the benefits and conveniences of both locations.

Our Benefits:

At PayPal, we’re committed to building an equitable and inclusive global economy. And we can’t do this without our most important asset-you. That’s why we offer comprehensive, choice-based programs, to support all aspects of personal wellbeing—physical, emotional, and financial—delivering meaningful value where it matters most. We strive to create a flexible, balanced work culture with a holistic approach to benefits, including generous paid time off, healthcare coverage for you and your family, and resources to create financial security and support your mental health.

Who We Are:

Click Here to learn more about our culture and community.

Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

PayPal provides equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. In addition, PayPal will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. If you are unable to submit an application because of incompatible assistive technology or a disability, please contact us at paypalglobaltalentacquisition@paypal.com.

Belonging at PayPal:

Our employees are central to advancing our mission, and we strive to create an environment where everyone can do their best work with a sense of purpose and belonging. Belonging at PayPal means creating a workplace with a sense of acceptance and security where all employees feel included and valued. We are proud to have a diverse workforce reflective of the merchants, consumers, and communities that we serve, and we continue to take tangible actions to cultivate inclusivity and belonging at PayPal.

Any general requests for consideration of your skills, please Join our Talent Community.

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