Job Summary:
This job delivers complete solutions spanning all phases of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). It involves advising management on project-level issues, guiding junior engineers, operating with little supervision, and applying knowledge of technical best practices. In this role, you will be a key contributor to our AI-powered tooling initiative, designing and building intelligent systems that enhance the productivity, reliability, and velocity of Venmo's Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps engineering teams.

Job Description:

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:

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

Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications:

Engineering at Venmo

At Venmo, we are creating a product that people love. We strive to create a delightful user experience while connecting the world and empowering people through payments. We are looking for intellectually curious people who want to be inspired and inspire others to change the world.

Engineering is a craft, and at Venmo we want the internals of our software to be as elegant as the end user experience we are designing. We spend our days scaling our infrastructure and building new features to meet and exceed our users' needs and wants. We work with a product team that is data-driven and human-centered in its design principles. We teach and learn from one another and push each other to be at our creative and analytical best.

Our team is dedicated to ensuring the seamless operation of all user-facing services, as well as production and development systems. We manage Venmo's infrastructure comprehensively, encompassing operations, automation, security, compliance, and release engineering. While we are focused on Cloud Engineering, our work integrates elements of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps projects as well.

On the DevOps front, we oversee CI/CD infrastructure, develop smart and secure pipelines, implement self-service secret management systems, create development environments, and establish microservices scaffolding and testing frameworks. The quality of the systems we build is paramount to the company, and we prioritize it highly. Our infrastructure must be delivered automatically, thoroughly tested, and scanned for vulnerabilities through synthetic tests.

As a Senior Engineer on the AI Tooling team, you will design and build AI-powered tools and integrations that directly improve how Venmo's Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps engineers work. You are a hands-on contributor who bridges deep cloud/DevOps knowledge with applied AI development-building solutions like LLM-powered runbook assistants, intelligent alerting systems, AI-assisted infrastructure code generation, and autonomous remediation tooling. You teach by example and mentor other engineers on how to effectively integrate AI into engineering workflows.

Our technical stack: AWS, EKS, Docker, GitHub Enterprise, Terraform, GitHub Actions, DataDog, Bash, Python, Go.

What You'll Do

• Act as a hands-on contributor, while leading by example
• Mentor junior engineers
• Enjoy a high degree of independence in decision-making while being accountable for results of yourself and your team
• Be part of a team dedicated to driving the scalability and reliability of Venmo's AWS cloud infrastructure
• Contribute to initiatives: internal teams rarely have dedicated project managers. You will define the design, identify stakeholders, navigate risks and changes, coordinate colleagues' work, implement solutions, and be accountable for timely and quality project delivery
• Troubleshoot incidents, identify root causes, fix and document problems, and implement preventive measures
• Lead by example, making meaningful contributions to the improvement of engineering teams' production operations
• Develop and improve tools and automation to manage infrastructure and application configuration as code
• Enhance the quality, reliability, and stability of our infrastructure and operations
• Design and build LLM-powered tools that assist Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps engineers with tasks such as runbook generation, incident triage, configuration review, and root cause analysis
• Develop AI-assisted automation pipelines that reduce toil and accelerate common infrastructure workflows (e.g., provisioning, scaling, deployment)
• Integrate AI capabilities into existing developer tooling, CI/CD pipelines, and observability platforms
• Build and maintain internal AI platforms and APIs that enable other engineering teams to leverage LLM and ML capabilities in their own workflows
• Evaluate and drive adoption of emerging AI tools, frameworks, and models relevant to cloud and DevOps use cases
• Establish best practices for responsible AI use in engineering workflows, including evaluation, safety, and observability of AI-generated outputs

What We're Looking For

• Bachelor's in computer science or related field of study
• 5+ years' experience in software development or a related field
• 3+ years' experience operating distributed applications 24x7x365, as part of a Cloud Engineering, DevOps, and/or SRE team
• Extensive hands-on experience with designing, implementing, and supporting infrastructure (AWS experience preferred) to support global-scale services
• Deep hands-on experience with IaaS and PaaS solutions from AWS (or similar cloud provider)
• Hands-on programming and scripting (Python, Java, Bash, Go)
• Hands-on experience with containers and container orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes
• Strong communication skills with the ability to understand and explain technical issues to a non-technical audience
• Hands-on experience building applications with LLMs or generative AI frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI API, Amazon Bedrock, or similar)
• Experience with prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and LLM evaluation techniques
• Experience integrating AI/ML capabilities into developer tools, CLIs, chatbots, or internal platforms
• Familiarity with AI observability, output safety, and responsible AI practices in production systems
• Experience with ML model serving, vector databases, or embedding pipelines is a plus
• Ability to translate ambiguous engineering pain points into well-scoped AI-powered solutions

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 | ($143,500.00 - $212,850.00 Annually)

Additional Location(s) | Pay Range:
Austin, Texas | ($130,500.00 - $193,600.00 Annually)
Scottsdale, Arizona | ($123,500.00 - $183,700.00 Annually)

Additional compensation for this role may include an annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation, as applicable.

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.