Principal Experience Architecture & AI Innovation

The Company

PayPal has been revolutionizing commerce globally for more than 25 years. Creating innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, PayPal empowers consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy. We operate a global, two-sided network at scale that connects hundreds of millions of merchants and consumers, facilitating payments online or in person. PayPal provides proprietary payment solutions, offering customers flexibility to use accounts for purchases, payments, transfers, and withdrawals using various funding sources, including bank accounts, PayPal/Venmo balances, credit products, cards, and cryptocurrencies. Our services also simplify peer-to-peer transfers and offer merchants end-to-end payment solutions, authorization, settlement capabilities, instant fund access, and risk management. We also enable cross-border shopping and trade, reducing complexity and friction. Our core values of Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, and Wellness guide our daily business, ensuring we work as one global team with customers at the center.

Job Description Summary

We are seeking a systems-minded design and technology leader to define the flow of intelligence, automation, and data within PayPal's design organization. This Principal Experience Architecture & AI Innovation role will architect the connective tissue between people, tools, and platforms, shaping how Experience Design (XD) operates in an AI-enabled product ecosystem. It is a highly hands-on, exploratory position for someone fluent in both design craft and engineering logic, comfortable prototyping, integrating, and scaling new capabilities across the company.

Essential Responsibilities

• Establish overall business or technical strategy for user experience initiatives.
• Negotiate with and influence decision-making reaching the senior executive level.
• Identify and resolve unique situations of substantial significance in user interface or interaction design.
• Allocate resources responsibly and apply creativity to enhancing user and customer experiences across digital and physical products and services.
• Lead the development of user experience strategies that resonate with target audiences.
• Support and mentor less-experienced roles to provide an example of innovation, excellence, and day-to-day learning.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.

Mission

To evolve PayPal’s design operating system into an intelligent, adaptive network that connects design data, customer intent, and product performance — enabling the organization to move from reactive delivery to predictive, insight-driven creation.

Key Responsibilities

AI-Enabled Workflow Architecture

• Map and re-design design-to-delivery workflows, identifying where automation and intelligence can remove friction or unlock new capability.
• Prototype AI-assisted processes for design QA, accessibility, content creation, and portfolio planning.
• Partner with Design Ops and Finance to integrate data pipelines linking Asana, Jira, Figma, and Workday into the AI-Planning system.

Experience Intelligence Hub

• Lead the concept and technical prototype of the Experience Intelligence Hub — a central layer connecting customer intent data, product telemetry, and design decisions.
• Define taxonomy, metadata, and data flows between XD, Research, and Product Analytics.
• Partner with AI Platform teams to safely expose and visualize insights for design use.

Systems Innovation

• Work with the VP Platforms & Tools and Senior Director, Experience Architecture to connect system design, service blueprints, and experience data models.
• Introduce intelligent pattern libraries that adapt based on usage and performance signals.
• Prototype AI copilots and plugins that bring intelligence into daily design workflows.

Capability & Enablement

• Coach cross-functional partners on AI-native ways of working; create documentation and proof points that scale adoption.
• Collaborate with XD leadership on a roadmap for automation maturity and capability development.
• Partner with the CDO Office to quantify ROI and efficiency gains from automation pilots.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Operate across Design, Product, Engineering, Data Science, and Finance.
• Translate technical possibilities into design outcomes — showing, not telling, what intelligence-driven design looks like in practice.

Qualifications

• 10–15 years blending design, engineering, and systems work (e.g., design technologist, systems designer, creative technologist, or principal IC).
• Strong command of modern product toolchains: Figma, Replit, Cursor, Jira, Confluence, Workday, and APIs.
• Demonstrated experience integrating AI/ML models, building plugins or workflow automations.
• Fluency in JavaScript/TypeScript or Python; ability to prototype intelligent tools.
• Strategic thinker who can visualize systems and communicate them clearly to executives.
• Thrives in ambiguous environments and can independently identify leverage points for change.

Key skills/competency

• AI-Enabled Workflows
• Experience Intelligence
• Systems Innovation
• Design Automation
• Product Toolchains
• Figma
• Jira
• AI/ML Integration
• JavaScript/Python
• Strategic Thinking