Director – Intelligent Routing & Platform Infrastructure

PayPal • Austin, TX

2d • $188,000 - $294,250 • Hybrid

About The Position

PayPal moves money for hundreds of millions of people and businesses across the globe — and the infrastructure that makes that possible must be nothing short of extraordinary. We are looking for a Director of Software Engineering to lead the teams responsible for the intelligent fabric that routes, secures, and scales every transaction and API call across our global platform. We are looking for a transformation leader — someone who arrives with a sharp point of view on what world-class infrastructure looks like, the engineering conviction to make the case for it, and the operational discipline to execute it at PayPal's scale. You will own our intelligent routing services (Service Mesh, API Gateway), Kubernetes fleet management, and IaaS platforms. More importantly, you will set a new bar for how these systems are built, operated, and evolved.

Requirements

• 10+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 2 years of experience leading others
• 15+ years of software engineering experience with at least 5+ years leading senior engineering organizations (multiple teams, multiple managers)

Nice To Haves

• Proven track record building and developing high-performing engineering teams, including hiring senior and staff-level engineers and managers
• Ability to attract exceptional talent and build a team culture of ownership, accountability, and psychological safety
• Experience leading geographically distributed and diverse teams across time zones and cultures
• Strong executive presence: you communicate technical strategy clearly to C-suite and can defend your architectural bets
• Deep expertise in service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd, Envoy), API gateway platforms (Kgateway, Kong, Apigee), and Layer 4/7 traffic management at scale
• Hands-on background in Kubernetes at enterprise scale — you understand the internals well enough to debug, the breadth to set fleet-wide standards, and the experience to know where the bodies are buried
• Strong foundation in IaaS and compute platforms — cloud-native and private cloud; familiarity with OpenStack, KVM, or equivalent private cloud stacks is a plus
• Fluency in networking fundamentals: BGP, DNS, TLS/mTLS, load balancing, CDN architecture
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and GitOps practices (Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, Flux)
• Familiarity with FinOps principles and infrastructure cost optimization at scale
• Demonstrated history of driving large-scale platform modernization or operational transformation initiatives — not just contributing to them, but owning them end to end
• Strong instincts for developer experience and platform product thinking
• Ability to develop multi-year technical roadmaps that balance innovation, reliability, and pragmatic execution
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and making high-quality decisions with imperfect information

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

Benefits

• comprehensive, choice-based programs, to support all aspects of personal wellbeing—physical, emotional, and financial—delivering meaningful value where it matters most
• flexible, balanced work culture with a holistic approach to benefits, including generous paid time off, healthcare coverage for you and your family, and resources to create financial security and support your mental health

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director