Principal Platform Architect

Braintree - San Jose, CA

Full-time - Principal

San Jose, CA

Personal and Laundry Services

About the position

The Principal Platform Architect role at PayPal involves providing technical leadership across the Pricing and FX Platforms Engineering Team, which supports various verticals within the company, including Treasury and Merchant domains. The position focuses on designing scalable and highly available systems while mentoring junior team members and guiding technology selection across projects. The role is high-visibility and high-impact, aimed at enhancing system performance and customer experience through innovative technologies such as Cloud and AI/ML.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership across a complex business area for Pricing and FX.
• Support technical and leadership capabilities of other staff members.
• Shape technical requirements and solutions based on a solid understanding of business systems across multiple domains.
• Design systems while maintaining hands-on implementation time with current technologies.
• Guide technology selection across multiple projects and mentor junior team members.
• Establish best practices for code quality and reduction in tech debt.
• Identify opportunities for refactoring and tech debt remediation.
• Influence management for technical decision-making regarding technology selection.
• Work across organizations to establish technical guidelines and standards.
• Drive decision-making with team members to synthesize the best solutions.

Requirements

• 15-20 years of strong technical experience in distributed and transactional systems.
• Strong experience in Java/J2EE and cloud platform technologies (AWS preferred).
• Knowledge of web services (REST/SOAP), ORM (Hibernate), Spring MVC, and programming in languages like Python, XML, HTML, Unix, and C++.
• Understanding of algorithmic techniques/design patterns and experience with Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA).
• Experience with relational databases (NoSQL).

Nice-to-haves

• Preference for Agile methodologies.
• Experience with Linux and Vim.
• Experience in traditional and non-traditional SORs from Oracle to Couchbase and Cassandra.
• Understanding of cloud technologies.
• Knowledge of payments and financial services.
• Solid knowledge of emerging best practices in technology.

Benefits

• Annual performance bonus or other incentive compensation.
• Equity options.
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits.