Director, Data Platforms & Performance Engineering - Venmo

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 Description Summary: This role provides strategic leadership and direction for Venmo's data platform infrastructure and performance engineering organizations. The Director will lead multiple teams of engineering managers and individual contributors responsible for mission-critical databases, data pipelines, messaging systems, caching infrastructure, and performance engineering that powers Venmo's real-time payment processing at massive scale. This role requires deep technical expertise combined with business acumen to drive organizational strategy and influence company-wide technical decisions.
Job Description: Essential Responsibilities:

Directs and controls the delivery of business and technical outcomes that comprise multiple projects and operational activities within a domain through organizational and technical leadership
Defines engineering health objectives that drive organization health, engineering best practices and operational targets
Drives product and technical strategy with cross-functional leaders across the enterprise to deliver Domain goals
Responsible for the delivery of programs, establishing annual organizational goals and ensuring performance and results that impact both their domain and potentially enterprise
Develops engineering strategy that translates into operational and tactical plans; uses ground-breaking methods to think beyond existing solutions
Sets the tri-annual roadmap for a domain level organization. Defines the operational strategy for a domain based on a defined budget
Evaluates key business challenges and can complete complex, ambiguous initiatives having impact across engineering; directs the development of new or innovative solutions. Ability to deal with high levels of technical domain level ambiguity.
Collaborates with direct team, managers in org, stakeholders, managers in other orgs, external partners and business stakeholders

Minimum Qualifications:

10+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
2 years of experience leading others

Additional Responsibilities And Preferred Qualifications Job Description:
Essential Responsibilities:
Scope:
Set strategic direction and provide executive leadership for data infrastructure and performance engineering organizations supporting Venmo's transactional systems processing billions of payments annually. Drive multi-year technical roadmaps aligned with business objectives and lead organizational transformation initiatives.

Define and communicate a multi-year vision and strategy for Venmo's data platform infrastructure and performance engineering capabilities.
Lead organizational design and structure decisions to optimize for scale, efficiency, and business impact
Set strategic direction for cloud-based data infrastructure on AWS, establishing architectural standards and best practices across Aurora MySQL, DocumentDB, DyanamoDB, Cassandra, Redis, and associated proxy technologies
Define architectural vision and standards for messaging platforms (Kafka) and streaming data pipelines that deliver analytics insights to business stakeholders
Establish organization-wide performance strategy and lead initiatives to eliminate bottlenecks across Venmo, ensuring systems can scale for 10X growth
Oversee chaos engineering programs and enterprise-wide capacity planning processes to validate infrastructure readiness for major events including holidays, promotional campaigns, and high-transaction volume periods
Drive technical debt reduction and platform modernization initiatives with measurable business outcomes
Collaborate with product management, security, compliance, and business operations teams to ensure technical solutions meet both functional requirements and regulatory obligations
Develop engineering talent through mentorship, coaching, and creating opportunities for technical growth and leadership development
Own budget planning, financial forecasting, and resource management to deliver maximum value within allocated investments
Establish operational excellence practices including monitoring, alerting, incident response, and post-incident analysis to continuously improve system reliability and achieve 99.999%+ uptime targets

Expected Qualifications:

Minimum of 15+ years of professional experience in software engineering or data platform roles, with a bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
5+ years' experience building and running in production distributed large-scale systems in cloud. (AWS Preferred)
8+ years leading engineering teams focused on data platforms, distributed systems, or infrastructure
3+ years' experience managing engineering managers and leading organizations of 20+ engineers.
Technical depth in multiple database paradigms (relational, NoSQL), distributed caching, and message queue architectures
Proven track record delivering performance improvements and scalability enhancements for consumer-facing applications serving millions of users
Experience navigating organizational transformation and managing teams through periods of rapid growth

Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications:

Background in financial technology, payments processing, or regulated industries
History of supporting transaction processing systems requiring extreme reliability and millisecond-level response times
Familiarity with resilience engineering practices, failure injection testing, and business continuity planning
Knowledge of modern data pipeline frameworks and real-time analytics architectures
Ability to build alignment across engineering, product, and business stakeholders on technical priorities and trade-offs
Commitment to building diverse, inclusive teams and fostering psychological safety
Strong communication skills for conveying complex technical concepts to varied audiences including executives

Job Title: Director, Data Platforms & Performance Engineering - Venmo
The base pay for this role will depend on where you work and the relevant experience and expertise you bring. The expected range of pay for this role by location is:
Primary Location : Pay Range:
San Jose, California : ($218,000.00 - $323,950.00 Annually)
Additional Location(s) : Pay Range:
No other locations are assigned to this requisition currently.
Additional compensation for this role may include an annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation, as applicable.
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 benefits to help you thrive in every stage of life. We champion your financial, physical, and mental health by offering valuable benefits and resources to help you care for the whole you.
We have great benefits including a flexible work environment, employee shares options, health and life insurance and more. To learn more about our benefits please visit https://www.paypalbenefits.com
Who We Are:
To learn more about our culture and community visit https://about.pypl.com/who-we-are/default.aspx
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.
REQ ID R0133916