Staff Network Engineer Backbone & Cloud

Staff Network Engineer Backbone & Cloud at PayPal

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. We help merchants and consumers connect, transact, and complete payments, whether they are online or in person.

Our beliefs are the foundation for how we conduct business every day. We live each day guided by our core values of Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, and Wellness. Together, our values ensure that we work together as one global team with our customers at the center of everything we do – and they push us to ensure we take care of ourselves, each other, and our communities.

Job Summary

This Staff Network Engineer Backbone & Cloud role oversees PayPal's hybrid Multi-cloud networking infrastructure, load balancers, and global backbone. It handles outages, leads network design, supports system availability, deploys equipment, implements best practices, offers on-call support, manages global teams, communicates incident impacts, and creates documentation.

Essential Responsibilities

• Lead the configuration, maintenance, and optimization of the organization's network and security infrastructure to ensure high performance and reliability.
• Architect and integrate networks across multiple business units and diverse cloud environments, ensuring seamless connectivity and scalability.
• Champion the use of Infrastructure as Code processes to automate and maintain infrastructure consistency, scalability, and up-to-date configurations.
• Oversee the configuration, deployment, and management of F5 Local Traffic Managers (LTMs) and Advanced Security Modules (ASMs) to ensure seamless application delivery and security.
• Create and implement strategies for integrating cloud Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), interconnects, and direct connects, ensuring efficient and secure data flow between on-premises and cloud environments.
• Proactively identify opportunities to enhance the network’s scalability and resilience, ensuring it can handle growing business demands and traffic loads.
• Work closely with infrastructure, application, and security teams to ensure network designs meet cross-functional requirements and adhere to best practices.

Expected Qualifications

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

Additional Responsibilities And Preferred Qualifications

• Proficiency with leading public cloud providers network services - AWS and GCP is a must, and experience with Azure is desirable.
• Deep hands-on experience with Terraform for network automation, infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud resource lifecycle management.
• Strong experience with open-source load balancers, especially HAProxy, including configuration, tuning, observability, and deployment automation.
• Experience with Kubernetes networking, including Ingress, Service Mesh, CNI plugins.
• Deep hands-on expertise in cloud networking: VPC Network, Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect Gateway, Interconnect, Cloud Router, VPN, and firewall rules (Security Groups, GCP Firewall).
• PrivateLink and Private Service Connect (PSC) for secure and scalable service exposure.
• Use Infrastructure as Code processes to automate and maintain infrastructure consistency, scalability, and up-to-date configurations.
• Implement and manage network security controls using Palo Alto and Fortinet firewalls, VPNs, etc. in public Cloud environments.
• Strong understanding of networking protocols and technologies, including TCP/IP, BGP, OSPF, MPLS, DNS, VPN.
• Utilize network monitoring tools (e.g., LogicMonitor, Datadog, AWS Cloudwatch, Splunk, Catchpoint, Nagios, etc.) to proactively identify and resolve network issues.
• Implement network changes following established change management procedures, minimizing risk and ensuring minimal impact to production services.
• Participate in incident management processes, including troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and post-incident reviews.
• Adhere to security policies, procedures, and best practices, ensuring the network infrastructure meets all compliance requirements.
• Implement and continually improve operational procedures, systems, and network engineering best practices.
• Provide Tier 2 support for network incidents impacting our production systems, ensuring timely resolution and minimal disruption to service. This includes on-call rotation responsibilities.
• Excellent troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.
• Relevant AWS and/or GCP Networking certifications.

Nice to have

• Experience with container networking (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker).
• Experience configuring, managing, and troubleshooting Juniper routing and switching platforms, including Juniper MX and QFX series.
• Working knowledge of networking technologies, including Layer-2 and Layer-3 protocols (TCP/IP, BGP, OSPF/IS-IS, MPLS) operating global backbone.
• Hands-on experience managing Backbone traffic engineering (MPLS, RSVP-TE, Segment Routing), public peering with ISPs, CDNs and partners.
• Juniper Service Provider certifications (JNCIS / JNCIP) are highly desirable.

Key skills/competency

• AWS Network Services
• GCP Network Services
• Terraform
• F5 LTM & ASM
• HAProxy
• Kubernetes Networking
• Palo Alto/Fortinet Firewalls
• BGP, OSPF, MPLS
• Network Monitoring (Splunk, Datadog)
• Cloud VPC/Interconnects