Description
This is an incident command role. You'll direct application and infrastructure teams during incidents, making work assignments, prioritizing troubleshooting paths, and authorizing critical actions like rollbacks and regional failovers.
The Site Health Engineering (Command Center) team serves as the operational and technical authority during PayPal's most critical incidents. We are a team of experienced infrastructure and reliability professionals who blend deep technical expertise with sound judgment under pressure, directing cross-functional engineering efforts across PayPal's core platforms and family of brands, including Venmo, Xoom, Zettle, and Braintree.
Responsibilities:
- Delivers complete solutions spanning all phases of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)
- 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
- Proactively identifies and addresses vulnerabilities in cloud and on-premises infrastructure
- Reviews Infrastructure as Code changes for reliability risks
- Identifies architectural anti-patterns in Kubernetes deployments and cloud migrations
- Conducts regular disaster recovery drills and readiness tests
- Participates in situation room activities for new product rollouts
- Drives site resilience projects to enhance system reliability and uptime
- Implements automated monitoring solutions to detect single points of failure
- Leads new datacenter and CDN certification initiatives
- Acts as incident commander with final decision authority
- Directs application and infrastructure teams during incidents
- Rapidly assesses incidents by reading Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes manifests, and CI/CD configurations
- Gives final authorization for critical actions
- Interfaces with executive leadership during critical incidents and post-mortems
- Identifies when incidents stem from teams deviating from established cloud-native patterns
- Commands cross-functional teams during high-severity incidents
- Leads blameless postmortem sessions and contributes to Root Cause Analysis (RCA) processes
- Drives continuous improvement initiatives based on incident learnings
Requirements:
- 3+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience
- Significant hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS or GCP required; multi-cloud experience preferred)
- Strong proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tools
- Significant hands-on experience with Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystem tools
- Ability to quickly read and review code across multiple languages
- Proven experience managing critical incidents in Infrastructure-as-Code driven environments
- Professional-level certification in at least one major cloud platform
- Experience with monitoring and observability tools
- Strong knowledge of networking, load balancing, CDN technologies, and DNS management
- Proficiency in scripting for operational automation