Sr SWE, Fraud Science Data Platform

Job Summary

The Fraud Science & Intelligence (FSI) team at PayPal builds the data and intelligence platforms that safeguard our customers and enable risk, compliance, and financial crime detection at global scale. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will develop, maintain, and optimize the SQL pipelines that power our fraud feature store and account linking intelligence systems. You will work on production grade data transformations in BigQuery, manage job scheduling and orchestration, and drive performance improvements to reduce runtime execution costs. This role is ideal for an engineer who loves building efficient, maintainable SQL pipelines and wants to see their work directly impact fraud detection across PayPal's platform.

Essential Responsibilities

• Deliver complete solutions spanning all phases of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) (design, implementation, testing, delivery and operations), based on definitions from more senior roles.
• Advise immediate management on project level issues.
• Guide junior engineers.
• Operate with little day to day supervision, making technical decisions based on knowledge of internal conventions and industry best practices.
• Apply knowledge of technical best practices in making decisions.

Additional Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and optimize software for processing large scale graphs, with careful attention to algorithmic complexity, memory usage, and performance trade offs.
• Leverage graph algorithms and libraries-traversal, connected components, community detection, clustering, path ranking, and related techniques-to address fraud linking problems.
• Work with existing fraud linking systems and supplement them with new capabilities, improved algorithms, reusable modules, and better tooling.
• Translate fraud patterns, investigative findings, and team requirements into practical software implementations.
• Create and select relevant features from raw data for use in FSL's fraud linking framework.
• Apply basic statistical reasoning to combine multiple weak or noisy signals into stronger fraud indicators.
• Identify opportunities to integrate FSL graph linking capabilities with partner teams' platforms and workflows.
• Anticipate future scale, performance, and maintainability challenges, and proactively propose improvements.
• Collaborate with fraud experts, investigators, data scientists, ML teams, and other engineers to improve fraud detection coverage.

Minimum Qualifications

• 3+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree OR any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithmic complexity, memory usage, and performance trade offs.

Preferred Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in software engineering, algorithmic engineering, research engineering, or another role involving complex data structures and performance sensitive code.
• Strong programming skills in a modern language (Python preferred) and comfort working with large datasets in a cloud data warehouse.
• Working knowledge of graph algorithms and the ability to choose appropriate techniques and tools for a given problem.
• Ability to take an ambiguous problem, reason through possible algorithmic approaches, and implement a pragmatic solution.
• Track record of shipping and maintaining production quality code, with strong habits around testing, profiling, and documentation.
• Self driven and intellectually curious, with the ability to operate independently in an evolving problem space.

Benefits

Our hybrid work model offers three days in the office for collaboration and two days that are flexible between the PayPal office or home workspace. We provide comprehensive, choice based programs supporting physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing, generous paid time off, healthcare coverage for you and your family, and resources to support financial security and mental health.

EEO Statement

PayPal provides equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status or veteran status. In addition, PayPal will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. If you are unable to submit an application because of incompatible assistive technology or a disability, please contact us at .