Lead Software Engineer - Risk Solutions
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
- 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, 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, 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.
Requirements
- 8+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications:
Key Responsibilities Lead architecture and delivery of intelligent systems supporting PayPal's Risk and Fraud platforms - with strong emphasis on cloud, data, and backend service design. Build and maintain real-time and batch data pipelines, APIs, and event-driven services operating at petabyte scale and sub-second latency. Champion cloud-native engineering practices, especially within Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and big data ecosystems (e.g., BigQuery, Dataproc, Pub/Sub, Airflow). Integrate AI-assisted development tools into the engineering lifecycle (e.g., test-generation bots, RAG-based copilots, code accelerators) to boost developer efficiency and reliability. Partner closely with Product, Design, Data Science, and Analytics to translate domain goals into robust, scalable technical solutions. Provide technical leadership across the SDLC: architecture reviews, coding standards, security practices, scalability assessments, and release readiness. Drive engineering best practices: clean architecture, CI/CD automation, observability, and reusable component design. Mentor and support junior engineers, cultivating a culture of learning, ownership, and craftsmanship. Collaborate across teams to align on platform strategy and enable extensibility and reuse in shared infrastructure. Required Skills and Qualifications 10+ years of software engineering experience, including ownership of distributed, data-intensive systems in large-scale production environments. Strong expertise in cloud-native engineering, with a preference for GCP. Hands-on experience with BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataproc, Cloud Functions, or equivalent services. Proficient in backend development using Java, Python, or Node.js, with a deep understanding of microservices and service orchestration. Hands-on experience with Big Data frameworks: Apache Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Hive, and Airflow. Experience designing and optimizing streaming architectures and near real-time processing systems. Strong understanding of data modeling, SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g., MySQL, MongoDB, Redis), and performance tuning at scale. Exposure to AI-assisted engineering tools or strong interest in leveraging such tools to improve software delivery. Solid grounding in computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, operating systems. Familiarity with DevOps, including CI/CD pipelines, automation, and performance monitoring. Excellent communication and collaboration skills; experience working across cross-functional teams. Preferred Qualifications Prior experience building or integrating with Risk, Fraud, or Trust & Safety systems at global scale. Exposure to agentic AI tools or developer copilots such as code-generation agents, test automation bots, or RAG-based assistants. Familiarity with AI/ML pipeline integration, such as feature stores, inference orchestration, or model monitoring (as a consumer). Knowledge of stream processing architectures (e.g., Kafka Streams, Apache Beam, Flink). Experience building shared platform components, SDKs, or internal frameworks across teams or domains. Awareness of privacy-preserving engineering, security best practices, and compliance-oriented systems. Ability to influence architecture decisions and lead cross-cutting technical efforts across multiple teams. Why This Role Matters This role is pivotal to shaping PayPal's future in AI-enabled Risk and Fraud engineering. You will be at the forefront of building trusted, secure, and intelligent platforms that scale globally. Your work will directly impact our ability to protect customers, accelerate innovation, and build the foundations for developer productivity and data intelligence across PayPal.
Benefits & conditions
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.