Principal Engineer, Cloud Data Infrastructure

Job Summary: This role is the technical authority for Venmo's data platform infrastructure and performance engineering. The Principal Engineer sets the technology vision, defines architectural direction, and provides deep technical leadership for the teams responsible for mission-critical databases, data pipelines, messaging systems, caching infrastructure, and performance engineering powering Venmo's real-time payment processing at massive scale.

This is a deeply hands-on individual contributor role with broad organizational influence - you will stay close to the code and systems, own technical strategy, pioneer AI-first engineering practices, and mentor the Venmo data platform engineering community. You will also serve as the primary technical voice in cross-functional and executive-level conversations.

- 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

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

- Background in financial technology, payments processing, or regulated industries.

- Experience supporting transaction processing systems requiring extreme reliability and millisecond-level response times.

- Familiarity with resilience engineering, failure injection testing, and business continuity planning.

- Knowledge of modern data pipeline frameworks and real-time analytics architectures.

- History of mentoring and growing senior/staff-level engineers into technical leadership roles.

- Experience integrating AI/ML workflows into data platform infrastructure including vector databases, feature stores, or LLM serving infrastructure.

Primary Location | Pay Range: San Jose, California | ($218,000.00 - $323,950.00 Annually)

Additional Location(s) | Pay Range: Austin, Texas | ($198,000.00 - $294,250.00 Annually)