Sr Staff Software Engineer, AI Innovation

Role details

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, b