Staff Database Engineer

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:

Job Summary
At PayPal, the Transaction Processing and Data Services (TPDS) team powers the backbone of our global payments platform, processing billions of transactions through our mission-critical OLTP database infrastructure. We're seeking an exceptional Database Reliability Engineer to join our Database SRE team in a role that combines technical expertise with incident management leadership.

As a Database SRE specializing in incident management, you'll be at the forefront of maintaining and improving the reliability of systems that millions of customers depend on daily. This role offers the opportunity to drive significant improvements in our incident response capabilities, with a particular focus on reducing Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) across our database platform.

Job Description:

Essential Responsibilities:

• Architect, configure, and manage scalable, highly available database clusters (MySQL, CloudSQL, BigTable, Oracle).
• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, and Kubernetes.
• Develop CI/CD pipelines for schema and infrastructure automation with Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and GitLab CI.
• Design and enforce secure data handling, encryption, and access control practices.
• Optimize database and Big Data systems for performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Build monitoring and observability systems with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, and Datadog.
• Drive SLIs/SLOs/SLAs for database reliability and uptime.
• Automate database and platform management with Python-based tooling.
• Lead on-call rotations and drive root cause analysis and incident resolution.
• Collaborate with DevOps, data engineering, and analytics teams to deliver resilient data solutions.

Expected Qualifications:

• 5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Expertise in MySQL tuning, replication, indexing, and partitioning.
• Proficiency in Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, and distributed system design.
• Strong multi-cloud experience (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Hands-on experience with Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Packer, and Kubernetes.
• Advanced programming in Python and Bash for automation and integration.
• Deep knowledge of observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK).
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and optimization skills.
• Commitment to security, compliance, and operational excellence.

Additional Respo