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.
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.
