PayPal
Staff Engineer - Kafka Specialist
$160K–$262K
San Jose, California, United States of America +1 · Staff · Full-time · Posted Oct 9, 2026
- Location
- San Jose, California, United States of America
Austin, Texas, United States of America - Experience
- 5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree, or any equivalent combination of education and experience.
- Education
- Bachelor's and/or Master's in Computer Science or related field of study; minimum qualification also states a Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education and experience.
About the job
Leads the technical direction, architecture, and operational excellence of Venmo’s Kafka streaming platform, supporting reliable real-time data movement at scale.
What you'll do
- Own the Kafka platform roadmap and architecture, including cluster design, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and multi-region replication.
- Lead resolution of complex streaming incidents and establish engineering practices for Kafka operations, security, and data governance.
- Mentor engineers and partner with stakeholders to shape scalable streaming architecture and technical standards.
What they ask for
- Hands-on expertise operating and scaling Apache Kafka in production, including Kafka internals.
- Experience architecting Kafka for multi-region resilience, disaster recovery, and low-downtime upgrades.
- Experience with IAM-based Kafka security, Schema Registry, and Kafka Connect/Kafka Streams.
- Experience with AWS or similar cloud services, infrastructure as code, programming/scripting, and related data infrastructure.
Nice to have
- AWS Solutions Architect certification or Confluent Kafka certification.
Pay
USD 176,500.00 - USD 262,350.00 annually (base pay); USD 160,500.00 - USD 238,700.00 annually (base pay)
Tools
Apache Kafka, AWS, Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Python, Java, Lambda, AWS S3
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