PayPal
Sr Staff Software Engineer, AI Innovation
$196K–$292K
San Jose, California, United States of America · Senior Staff · Full-time · Posted Oct 20, 2026
- Experience
- 8+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR any equivalent combination of education and experience.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education and experience.
About the job
Leads research, prototyping, and production scaling of AI systems and experiences, including agentic systems, real-time voice, and multimodal products.
What you'll do
- Own high-visibility AI initiatives from research and experimentation through production; scale validated ideas into reliable products.
- Extend the agent platform’s orchestration, tool use, and evaluation, while tracking quality, latency, cost, and impact.
- Make cross-team technical decisions and partner with product, design, and engineering to turn validated ideas into platform capabilities.
What they ask for
- Senior- or staff-level engineering experience with impact beyond individual code contributions.
- Track record of shipping to real users and scaling ideas into reliable, secure, cost-efficient products.
- Hands-on experience building with LLMs or agentic systems.
- Strong engineering fundamentals in at least one modern language; clear communication with engineers and executives.
Nice to have
- Real-time voice or multimodal experience.
- Automated evaluation and observability for AI systems; deep knowledge of model fine-tuning and trade-offs.
Pay
USD 196,500.00 - 291,500.00 Annually (base pay)
Tools
LLMs
AI focus
Research, prototype, evaluate, and productionize agentic systems and AI experiences, including real-time voice and multimodal applications; improve agent orchestration, tool use, and evaluation.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative