PayPal · 2 hours ago
Principal Software Engineer, SMB &FS
Chicago, IL
Full-time
Hybrid
Lead/Staff
$188K/yr - $324K/yr
15+ years expPayPal is a global leader in commerce, empowering consumers and businesses to thrive in the economy. The Principal Software Engineer will own the technical vision for platforms powering SMBs, leading the evolution from on-prem to cloud-native architectures and architecting AI-native commerce capabilities.
E-Commerce PlatformsFinTechMobile PaymentsTransaction Processing
Responsibilities
Increases results & effectiveness of all software engineers in a large domain
Sets the technology roadmap for a domain
Adapts their role to the need, selecting the most effective means of realizing their technical goals
Provides advice and counsel to senior executives within PayPal, influencing the development of multi-year business strategies
Exercises wide latitude in determining objectives and approaches to assignments and takes initiative to achieve results
Handles ambiguous and unfamiliar situations and uses creativity to deliver decisive resolutions
Uses discovery & exploratory research, not being limited to technical domains, to make successful decisions
Identifies themes & trends that span projects and teams, and finds broadly impactful opportunities for improvement
Uses professional savvy to determine when industry-standard solutions can be adopted, versus when a problem space warrants a novel solution (“build/buy”)
Mentor others as a means of propagating technical influence, and to enhance the performance of their organization
Own the multi‑year architecture and migration strategy moving SMB & FS platforms from on‑prem to cloud‑native; define milestones, re-architect for cloud-native, and land secure, compliant, highly available services
Define platform standards (APIs, contracts, versioning, idempotency, SLOs, operational readiness) that unify payments, risk, onboarding, settlement, reconciliation, payouts, and capital experiences
Partner with product, risk, compliance, data, and finance to align technical choices to business outcomes; translate complex trade‑offs into clear, executive‑ready decisions
Grow Staff+ engineering capability: lead architecture reviews, create reusable frameworks and reference designs, and raise the quality bar across multiple teams
Qualification
Required
Minimum of 15 years of relevant work experience and a Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
Preferred
Track record designing and shipping large‑scale, low‑latency distributed systems in payments/fintech or similarly regulated, high‑availability domains
Led cloud migrations of mission‑critical systems to cloud (GCP expertise a plus); depth in container orchestration, service mesh, infrastructure‑as‑code, and automated delivery
Hands‑on experience building and operating production AI/ML-powered capabilities for commerce
Deep understanding of the merchant payments stack: acquiring/facilitation, tokenization, checkout, authorization/capture, disputes/chargebacks, settlement & reconciliation, payouts
Strong security and compliance background (PCI DSS, SOC2, PSD2/SCA); experience architecting for auditability, explainability, and controls
Expertise in event‑driven architecture and data platforms (e.g., Kafka/Pub/Sub, stream processing, feature stores, real‑time analytics) supporting decisioning at scale
Exceptional written and verbal influence across org boundaries and up to C‑suite; crisp design docs and decision records that drive alignment
Proven mentorship of Staff/Principal engineers and effectiveness establishing technical standards and communities of practice
API platform experience (REST/gRPC/GraphQL), SDK/developer‑experience mindset, and a bias for cost‑aware, operable designs (FinOps)
Benefits
Flexible work environment
Employee shares options
Health and life insurance
Company
PayPal
PayPal is a financial service company that provides online payment solutions to its users worldwide.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
PayPal has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (945)
2024 (918)
2023 (775)
2022 (921)
2021 (1051)
2020 (1049)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$12.17BKey Investors
Kohlberg Kravis RobertsBlueRun Ventures
2025-11-17Post Ipo Debt· $6.95B
2023-06-07Post Ipo Debt· $5B
2015-07-20IPO
Leadership Team
Simon Bladon
CEO, UK
chaloem khompitoon
President & CEO
Recent News
2025-12-31
The European Financial Review
2025-12-31
Company data provided by crunchbase