Senior Software Engineer – Environment Orchestration

PayPal • Austin, TX

9d • Hybrid

About The Position

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. We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Developer to join our Developer Operations team, specializing in Environment Orchestration. This role is responsible for designing, building, and operating scalable, self-service test environment platforms that enable development teams to provision production-like environments on demand. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in Infrastructure as Code (IaC), containerization, CI/CD pipeline engineering, observability, and cloud-native architectures. You will lead the strategy for ephemeral and persistent test environments, drive automation at scale, and embed DevSecOps and GitOps practices into environment lifecycle management. This is a technical leadership role that involves mentoring engineers, collaborating cross-functionally, and championing platform engineering principles to accelerate software delivery.

Requirements

• 3+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Hands-on expertise with Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation — including modular design, state management, and drift detection.
• Containerization & Orchestration: Deep experience with Docker and Kubernetes — preferably GKE — including Helm Charts, namespace isolation, and cluster operations.
• Cloud Platforms (GCP preferred): Strong hands-on experience with GCP services (GKE, Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, Cloud Run, IAM, VPC, Cloud Logging/Monitoring). Familiarity with AWS or Azure is a plus.
• CI/CD Pipeline Engineering: Proven ability to design and manage pipelines using GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Cloud Build, or ArgoCD with integrated environment provisioning and automated testing.
• Git & GitOps: Expert-level proficiency with GitHub/GitLab — branching strategies, pull request workflows, rebasing, and declarative, version-controlled infrastructure management.
• Cloud Platforms: Strong hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including compute, networking, IAM, and managed services.
• Advanced skills in API development and troubleshooting, with a focus on security and scalability.
• Linux & Scripting: Advanced Linux administration with strong proficiency in Bash/Shell and at least one of Python, Java, or Go.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience designing on-demand, short-lived test environments with automated lifecycle management (create, test, teardown).
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes/GKE, including orchestration, troubleshooting and scaling in production environments.
• Hands-on experience with TestNG, JUnit, or Selenium, with an understanding of shift-left testing practices.
• Expertise in CICD tools, with a focus on pipeline optimization and governance.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or OpenTelemetry for monitoring, alerting, and diagnostics.
• Experience building internal developer platforms, self-service portals, or environment-as-a-service capabilities.
• Experience with test data provisioning, data masking, or synthetic data generation.
• Proven leadership and mentoring skills, with a demonstrated ability to lead and develop high-performing technical teams.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field — or equivalent professional experience.
• Certifications (a plus): CKA, HashiCorp Terraform Associate, or Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect / Cloud Engineer certifications.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a proven track record designing solutions for complex, distributed systems.
• Communication and leadership skills, with experience mentoring engineers and collaborating across engineering, QA, and release teams.
• Ability to lead independently and as part of a senior leadership team in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.
• Experience with large-scale testing and quality engineering is highly advantageous.
• Strong familiarity with observability tools and practices is highly desirable.

Responsibilities

• Delivers complete solutions spanning all phases of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) (design, implementation, testing, delivery and operations), based on definitions from more senior roles.
• Advises immediate management on project-level issues
• Guides junior engineers
• Operates with little day-to-day supervision, making technical decisions based on knowledge of internal conventions and industry best practices
• Applies knowledge of technical best practices in making decisions
• Architect and build a self-service test environment platform, enabling development teams to provision production-like environments on demand with minimal friction.
• Design and implement ephemeral environment strategies tied to pull requests, feature branches, and CI/CD events — automating full lifecycle management including creation, testing, and teardown.
• Define and enforce environment-as-code standards using IaC tools (Terraform, Pulumi, or Crossplane), ensuring consistency, reproducibility, and drift detection across all non-production environments.
• Lead containerization and orchestration strategy using Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm Charts to package, deploy, and scale multi-service test environments — with a focus on GKE as the preferred orchestration platform.
• Design and implement cloud-native environment architectures leveraging GCP services (Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, Cloud Run, Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, IAM, VPC) while maintaining familiarity with multi-cloud patterns across AWS or Azure.
• Design, build, and govern CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or ArgoCD — integrating environment provisioning, automated testing, and teardown into the delivery workflow.
• Champion GitOps practices for environment management, ensuring all infrastructure and configuration changes are declarative, version-controlled, and applied through automated reconciliation.
• Integrate automated quality gates into pipelines, including test execution (TestNG, JUnit), static analysis, security scanning, and environment health checks.
• Establish observability practices for test environments using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or OpenTelemetry — enabling proactive monitoring, alerting, and diagnostics.
• Develop and maintain automation tooling using Python, Bash/Shell, or Go for environment provisioning, configuration management, data seeding, and operational workflows.
• Develop, troubleshoot, and optimize Java-based applications and test automation frameworks, with a focus on performance and scalability.
• Manage environment configuration governance, including version-controlled YAML/HCL templates, modular infrastructure definitions, and parameterized configurations stored in Git.
• Mentor and coach engineers in DevOps, platform engineering, and environment management best practices while driving cross-functional collaboration with QA, SRE, and release management teams.

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 comprehensive, choice-based programs, to support all aspects of personal wellbeing—physical, emotional, and financial—delivering meaningful value where it matters most.
• We strive to create a 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: Mid Level