Staff Software Engineer - Engineering Operations
PayPal View all jobs
- Chennai, Tamil Nadu
- Permanent
- Full-time
We’re a lean, self-motivated team of engineers and product managers united by a shared mission to enable seamless commerce around the world. We move with speed, believe in extreme ownership, and are driven by the impact our work has on the businesses and people who use our products every day.
We’re building a dedicated Engineering Operations team to provide critical engineering and business operations support for our payments systems.What you need to know about the role-
This role is a unique opportunity to join a specialized Engineering Operations team at the core of PayPal’s payments organization. You’ll take ownership of automating key business operations, triaging production issues with speed and precision, and partnering closely with engineering teams and external PayPal partners to rapidly restore functionality.Job Description:Essential Responsibilities:
- Acts as a project or system leader, coordinating the activities of other engineers on the project or within the system
- Determines the technical tasks that other engineers will follow
- Actions result in the achievement of customer, operational, program or service objectives
- Proactively improves existing structures & processes
- Exercises judgement in reconciling diverse and competing priorities (time, quality, complexity risk) to identify optimal solutions to problems
- Notices patterns and condenses repetition into densely meaningful generalized solutions
- Collaborates with management to set/improve standards for engineering rigor
- Trusted to represent PayPal, Inc to the outside world via interactions with partners, customers, or industry organizations
- 5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
- Provide Tier 2 / Tier 3 technical support for production issues across applications, APIs, and services
- Lead or participate in incident response, root cause analysis (RCA), and post-incident reviews
- Monitor system health, logs, alerts, and dashboards to proactively identify and mitigate issues
- Ensure SLAs/SLOs are met and escalations are handled effectively
- Participate in on-call/shift rotations including weekends and holidays
- Diagnose complex issues involving distributed systems, APIs, databases, and integrations
- Analyze logs, metrics, traces, and dashboards to identify performance, availability, or data issues
- Collaborate with engineering teams to reproduce, diagnose, and fix defects
- Drive long-term fixes rather than short-term workarounds
- Build and maintain tools, scripts, or automation to improve operational efficiency
- Improve monitoring, alerting, and runbooks to reduce MTTR
- Identify opportunities to eliminate manual processes and recurring issues
- Create and maintain runbooks, SOPs, and technical documentation
- Contribute to internal knowledge bases and support playbooks
- Mentor junior support engineers and share best practices
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, tech operations, SRE, or production support roles
- Strong understanding of web technologies, APIs (REST/GraphQL), and microservices
- Hands-on experience supporting high-availability production systems
- Proficiency with SQL and ability to analyze data for debugging
- Experience working with Linux/Unix systems
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work under pressure
- Experience supporting payments, fintech, or financial systems
- Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Experience with monitoring tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, ELK)
- Experience with Java / Spring Boot and troubleshooting backend systems
- Scripting experience in Python, Bash or similar languages
- Exposure to CI/CD pipelines and DevOps or SRE practices
- Experience working with external vendors, processors, or partners
- Production support & incident management
- Debugging distributed systems
- Root cause analysis (RCA)
- Automation mindset
- Cross-team collaboration
- Clear technical and business communication