Senior Backend Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer - Backend (Java)

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:

What You Need to Know About the Role:
EDM is the platform behind every approve/decline decision at PayPal. When a transaction comes in, our system evaluates fraud signals, risk scores, compliance rules, and merchant policies, then returns a decision in milliseconds. We handle billions of these decisions a day. The platform is going through a major modernization effort, and this team is at the center of it.
The team owns a custom domain-specific language (RDSL), the Studio UI where rules are authored and tested, the runtime engine that executes them in production, a Kubernetes fleet of 250+ use cases, and a new set of AI agents that convert natural-language rule descriptions into valid RDSL and feed them into the release pipeline. This is a full-stack platform role, not a narrow feature team.

Job Description:

Essential Responsibilities:

• Delivers complete solutions spanning all phases of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) (design, implementation, testing, delivery and operations), based on definitions from more senior roles.
• Advises immediate management on project-level issues
• Guides junior engineers
• Operates with little day-to-day supervision, making technical decisions based on knowledge of internal conventions and industry best practices
• Applies knowledge of technical best practices in making decisions

Expected Qualifications:

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

Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications:

Meet Our Team:
The EDM engineering team builds and runs the systems below. Everyone on the team touches multiple areas depending on what’s needed.
K8s at Scale: 250+ Kubernetes deployments that the team provisions, monitors, and keeps running. Real production reliability problems daily.
Studio UI: The web app where analysts and engineers write, test, and publish decision rules. Think of it as the IDE for our DSL.
Runtime Engine: The low-latency backend that actually executes rules against live transactions across PayPal.
RDSL Platform: Our custom DSL, built on ANTLR grammars. The language itself, the compiler, and the tooling around it.
ML & Data: Connects ML models and feature stores into the decision pipeline so rules can use real-time signals.
AI Agents: Users describe rules in natural language, and the agent converts to valid RDSL and feeds it into the release process.

Your Way to Impact

Scope: Own and deliver features and components within a system. Contribute to design discussions.

K8s Fleet: Hands-on with provisioning, monitoring, and troubleshooting deployments. Improve existing tooling.

AI Agents: Build and iterate on agent components. Implement the natural-language-to-RDSL conversion and test coverage.

Leadership: Lead projects within the team. Collaborate with analysts and partner teams to ship features.

In Your Day-to-Day, You Will

• Write and review code across the Studio UI, runtime engine, RDSL compiler, and K8s infrastructure.
• Deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot services running on GKE across 250+ use cases.
• Work on AI agents that translate natural-language rule descriptions into RDSL and push them through the release pipeline.
• Collaborate with risk analysts, data scientists, and compliance teams to turn business requirements into decision rules.
• Debug production issues in a system that processes billions of decisions per day.
• Take ownership of features from design through deployment, with increasing scope over time.

What You Need to Bring

Strong background in distributed systems, particularly high-throughput, latency-sensitive services.

• Hands-on Kubernetes experience in production, ideally managing a large number of deployments.
• Familiarity with GCP services (BigQuery, BigTable, Spanner, GKE).
• Comfortable owning things end to end, from design through production operations.
• Solid engineering fundamentals and ability to ramp quickly on unfamiliar systems.
• Experience shipping features independently with limited guidance.
• Experience with compiler design, DSLs, or language tooling (ANTLR, etc.).
• Exposure to LLMs, agentic workflows, or natural-language-to-code systems.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain platform services using Java and Python, ensuring code quality, scalability, and performance
• Build and optimize data pipelines and storage solutions leveraging GCP services including BigQuery, BigTable, and GKE
• Work with Kubernetes-based deployments, demonstrating solid understanding of container orchestration, scaling strategies, and cluster operations
• Create detailed low-level designs and technical specifications for platform components, ensuring alignment with system architecture
• Own end-to-end delivery of features—from design through production deployment—with minimal supervision
• Contribute to frontend development (~20% of role) using React, supporting UI components and user-facing features as needed
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (product, data science, operations) to gather requirements and deliver integrated solutions
• Leverage AI-powered development tools (Copilot, Claude, etc.) to accelerate coding, code reviews, and documentation workflows
• Demonstrate intellectual curiosity in problem-solving—proactively investigate root causes, explore innovative solutions, and continuously seek to understand the "why" behind technical challenges
• Participate in code reviews, mentor junior engineers, and contribute to engineering best practices
• Troubleshoot production issues and implement improvements to enhance platform reliability

Subsidiary:

PayPal

Travel Percent:

0

PayPal does not charge candidates any fees for courses, applications, resume reviews, interviews, background checks, or onboarding. Any such request is a red flag and likely part of a scam. 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.

Experience Level

Senior Level