Description
Venmo's identity infrastructure is foundational , it underpins trust, safety, and compliance for every transaction on the platform. As a Sr. Staff Software Engineer, you will be a subject matter expert responsible for setting the technical direction for Venmo's identity platform, including authentication, authorization, identity verification, and fraud risk systems.
Key Responsibilities:
- Makes technical decisions affecting multiple teams, crossing organizational boundaries
- Establishes conventions & processes to be followed by other employees
- Actions determine the utilization of company resources (people, money, assets) and affect the effectiveness of the company
- Handles multiple, multi-team initiatives simultaneously, using judgement to prioritize among more issues than can be handled individually
- Understands evolving industry capabilities & practices and can judiciously apply up--to-date information for optimal results
- Competent at communicating technical issues with non-technical audiences
- Spreads their behavior, principles, and knowledge as a means of improving technical results of other employees
- Partners with product management, to ideate solutions to business problems & goals
Day-to-Day Responsibilities:
- Set the technical direction for Venmo's identity platform, including authentication, authorization, identity verification, and fraud risk systems
- Partner with PayPal's platform and security teams to align on shared identity standards, reusable infrastructure, and cross-org initiatives
- Lead architectural reviews and define engineering standards for how the Identity team builds, scales, and secures its systems
- Mentor and develop senior engineers
- Collaborate with Product, Legal, Compliance, and Security to translate regulatory and risk requirements into sound technical solutions
- Identify and proactively address risks , whether that's a fragile authentication flow, a compliance gap, or a scaling bottleneck , before they become incidents
- Own the performance and availability of the services, as well as participate in on-call rotations and provide support during incidents
Requirements:
- 8+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience
- Deep expertise in identity and access management , including protocols like OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, FIDO2/WebAuthn
- Proven track record of defining and shipping large-scale distributed systems
- Hands-on comfort with backend systems at scale (Python, Java, Go, or similar) and Cloud (AWS)
- Strong communication skills
Preferred Qualifications:
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent on identity, authentication, or security-critical systems at scale
- Experience working with or designing systems that meet regulatory requirements , KYC, AML, GDPR, or similar
- Expertise with building services on public cloud – preferably AWS
- Experience in managing infrastructure as code using Terraform