Site Reliability Engineer

About the job

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 Summary: What do you need to know about the role

This is an incident command role. You'll direct application and infrastructure teams during incidents making work assignments, prioritizing troubleshooting paths, and authorizing critical actions like rollbacks and regional failovers. You need the technical knowledge to rapidly read Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes manifests, and CI/CD configurations to make informed decisions under pressure.

Meet Our Team

The Site Health Engineering (Command Center) team serves as the operational and technical authority during PayPal's most critical incidents. We are a team of experienced infrastructure and reliability professionals who blend deep technical expertise with sound judgment under pressure, directing cross-functional engineering efforts across PayPal's core platforms and family of brands, including Venmo, Xoom, Zettle, and Braintree. Job Description: Essential Responsibilities:

- Actively monitor and analyze system metrics to ensure the availability, performance, and reliability of digital platforms and applications.

- Diagnose and resolve complex system issues, perform root cause analysis, and implement long-term fixes to prevent recurrence.

- Create and maintain automation scripts, tools, and processes to streamline operations, reduce manual effort, and enhance reliability.

- Configure and improve monitoring and alerting tools to provide actionable insights into system health and performance.

- Analyze system usage trends and forecast future resource requirements to ensure scalability and prevent capacity-related issues.

- Work with development teams to design and implement reliable, fault-tolerant systems, incorporating best practices for high availability.

- Ensure smooth and reliable software releases by managing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

- Perform failure simulations, such as chaos engineering, to identify weaknesses and improve system robustness.

- Develop and maintain detailed documentation for system configurations, operational procedures, and incident handling workflows.

- Partner with development, operations, and product teams to enhance system architecture for improved performance, reliability, and scalability.

Minimum Qualifications:

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

Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications :

Your way to Impact

Rather than building or maintaining infrastructure day-to-day, our team is entrusted with a broader mandate: safeguarding the reliability, resiliency, and availability of some of the world's most heavily trafficked financial platforms. We hold final decision-making authority during high-severity incidents, partner closely with executive leadership on post-incident learnings, and drive the tooling and processes that continuously strengthen our incident response capabilities. You'll also regularly interface with development teams and leadership during critical incidents and post-mortems, and drive implementation of tooling that advances the Command Center's capabilities.

Incident Management & Response

- Act as incident commander with final decision authority -- directing engineering teams, authorizing rollbacks, and commanding regional failovers

- Direct application and infrastructure teams during incidents by making work assignments and prioritizing troubleshooting paths

- Rapidly assess incidents by reading Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation), Kubernetes manifests, and CI/CD configurations

- Give final authorization for critical actions including production rollbacks, regional failovers, and emergency changes

- Interface with executive leadership during critical incidents and post-mortems to provide technical guidance and impact assessments

- Identify when incidents stem from teams deviating from established cloud-native patterns

- Command cross-functional teams during high-severity incidents affecting PayPal core and brand platforms (Venmo, Xoom, Zettle, Braintree)

- Lead blameless postmortem sessions and contribute to Root Cause Analysis (RCA) processes

- Drive continuous improvement initiatives based on incident learnings. Serve as the primary technical escalation point during critical incidents

- Accelerate incident response times through standardized playbooks and automated workflows

- Coordinate cross-functional teams during high-severity incidents affecting PayPal core and brand platforms (Venmo, Xoom, Zettle, Braintree)

- Drive continuous improvement initiatives based on incident learnings Cloud Exposure

- Leverage knowledge in cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) to drive incident resolution

- Support Braintree and Venmo cloud infrastructure operations

- Guide teams toward solutions by providing direction during incidents

- Stay current with emerging cloud technologies and best practices

- Implement automation, dashboards, and tooling to enhance the team's incident response capabilities

- Build runbooks and playbooks for cloud-native incident scenarios

- Develop internal tools and scripts to improve operational efficiency

- Drive projects that advance the Command Center's operational capabilities  Site Resiliency & Infrastructure Management

- Proactively identify and address vulnerabilities in cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) and on-premises infrastructure

- Review Infrastructure as Code changes for reliability risks as part of change approval process

- Identify architectural anti-patterns in Kubernetes deployments and cloud migrations

- Conduct regular disaster recovery drills and readiness tests before major events (Thanksgiving, Cyber 5, peak shopping seasons)

- Participate in situation room activities for new product rollouts

- Drive site resilience projects to enhance system reliability and uptime

- Proactively identify and address vulnerabilities in cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) and on-premises infrastructure

- Lead new datacenter and CDN certification initiatives

- Conduct regular disaster recovery drills and readiness tests before major events (Thanksgiving, Cyber 5, peak shopping seasons)

- Participate in situation room activities for new product rollouts

- Drive site resilience projects to enhance system reliability and uptime

In your day-to-day role you will be responsible for:

- 3days -4days alternating 12-hour shift pattern.

- Take ownership of system performance monitoring, identify inefficiencies, and lead initiatives to improve the overall availability and reliability of digital platforms and applications.

- Lead and manage the response to complex, high-priority incidents, ensuring prompt resolution and a thorough root cause analysis to prevent future occurrences.

- Lead reliability-focused initiatives, ensuring systems are highly available, resilient, and scalable, and promote best practices across engineering teams.

- Enhance the monitoring infrastructure by identifying key metrics, optimizing alerting, and improving system observability to ensure the reliability of large-scale systems.

- Partner with engineering and product teams to identify opportunities for improving system architecture, focusing on scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance.

- Drive continuous improvement across operational workflows, identifying areas for optimization, cost reduction, and performance enhancement.

What do you need to bring

Technical Skills

- Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS or GCP required; multi-cloud experience preferred)

- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystem tools, including troubleshooting K8s deployments, manifests, and cluster issues

- Proven experience managing critical incidents in Infrastructure-as-Code driven environments, including troubleshooting IaC state issues, GitOps failures, and cloud-native deployment problems

- Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Splunk, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana)

- Strong knowledge of networking, load balancing, CDN technologies, and DNS management

- 2+ years of experience in site reliability engineering, infrastructure operations, or similar technical operations roles

- Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)

Soft Skills

- Exceptional communication skills with ability to articulate complex technical issues to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

- Executive presence and ability to effectively communicate with senior leadership during high-pressure incidents and post-mortems

- Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities with a systematic approach to troubleshooting

- Ability to remain calm under pressure and make critical decisions during incidents

- Excellent collaboration skills with experience working across global, cross-functional teams

- Strong documentation skills and attention to detail