Lead Software Engineer, Backend

At Venmo, we are creating a product that people love. We strive to create a delightful user experience while connecting the world and empowering people through payments. We are looking for intellectually curious people who want to be inspired and inspire others to change the world. Engineering is a craft, and at Venmo we want the internals of our software to be as elegant as the end user experience we are designing. We spend our days scaling our infrastructure and building new features to meet and exceed our user’s needs and wants. We teach and learn from one another and push each other to be at our creative and analytical best. 

As a member of Venmo Engineering, you will act as a subject matter expert. We are looking for technologists with the highest levels of technical talent, programming, and communication skills with a keen desire to deeply understand our product and how to make our systems stronger and more resilient.  

Come join our team! 

What you will do 

• Establish a track record of successful technical leadership supported by a solid understanding of software architecture and the ability to effectively manage a team of cross-functional engineers. 

• Evangelist for technical standards, engineering best practices, and quality across larger Venmo team and PayPal, Inc.  

• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, architecture, and/or product development. 

• Experience in managing geographically distributed teams preferred. 

• Be leveraged for your technical expertise by leaders, providing significant input or ownership of decisions impacting multiple teams, processes to be designed and followed, and resource consumption decisions.  

• Be able to make informed decisions between competing priorities and identify the optimal solutions to problems while effectively communicating with impacted stakeholders affected by conflicts, decisions and tradeoffs.    

• Research and explore internal and industry-wide technologies to propose solutions to ambitious and ambiguous business problems. 

• Be practiced in incident management. You bring direction and clarity to ensure urgency in mitigation at the time of an incident and comprehensiveness in fast follow-ups with root cause analysis and corrective actions. Like us, you uphold the credo that we should never let a good customer have a bad day on our platform. 

• Expertise in technical product management, including agile delivery methodology, planning, estimating, staffing, and executing.  

Job Requirements 

• 12+ years of experience in Java, Python, or equivalent high-level programming language

• Ability to lead projects and mentor all levels of engineering staff, along with managing relationships with Product, Engineering Operations and non-technical business and support teams. 

• Expert skills with AWS OpenSearch and experience in developing, owning, and operating a world-class Search or Social platform.

• Focus on scalability, performance, service robustness, and cost trade-offs.

• Experience in architecting and developing fault-tolerant distributed services and backend systems, scaling to support millions of users with high concurrency. 

• Experience to apply scientific analysis and mathematical modeling techniques to predict, measure, and evaluate the consequences of designs and the ongoing success of our platform.

• DevOps mindset and expertise with building services on public cloud – AWS, GCP, Azure. 

• Strong understanding of testing best practices and familiarity with at least one testing framework.  

• Strong application security consciousness.  

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to understand and explain technical issues to a non-technical audience. 

• A strong collaborator, who is excited about teaching and learning from the team. Passionate about mentoring and developing software engineers. 

• Effective communication skills with the ability to understand and explain technical issues to a non-technical audience. 

• Bachelor’s and/or Master's degree in Computer science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or related field.