Staff Site Reliability Engineer (Mobile)

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. We help merchants and consumers connect, transact, and complete payments, whether they are online or in person. PayPal is more than a connection to third-party payment networks. We provide proprietary payment solutions accepted by merchants that enable the completion of payments on our platform on behalf of our customers.

We offer our customers the flexibility to use their accounts to purchase and receive payments for goods and services, as well as the ability to transfer and withdraw funds. We enable consumers to exchange funds more safely with merchants using a variety of funding sources, which may include a bank account, a PayPal or Venmo account balance, PayPal and Venmo branded credit products, a credit card, a debit card, certain cryptocurrencies, or other stored value products such as gift cards, and eligible credit card rewards.  Our PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom products also make it safer and simpler for friends and family to transfer funds to each other. We offer merchants an end-to-end payments solution that provides authorization and settlement capabilities, as well as instant access to funds and payouts. We also help merchants connect with their customers, process exchanges and returns, and manage risk. We enable consumers to engage in cross-border shopping and merchants to extend their global reach while reducing the complexity and friction involved in enabling cross-border trade. 

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:

We are building a new Mobile SRE team focused on ensuring the reliability, availability, and performance of our iOS and Android applications. While our existing SRE organization focuses on backend and web services, this new team will bridge the gap between mobile clients and backend systems, ensuring a seamless end-to-end experience for our customers.
As the Staff Mobile SRE, you will be the anchor of this new team: defining the vision, driving adoption of reliability practices in mobile engineering, and ensuring alignment with backend/web SRE teams. You’ll play a critical role in shifting our culture toward operational excellence in mobile development, while mentoring senior SREs across US and India.

Job Description:

• Manage and deliver large-scale reliability improvement projects, ensuring systems are performant, available, and resilient.
• Drive the identification of performance bottlenecks and lead initiatives to optimize and scale critical systems and services.
• Architect and implement scalable infrastructure solutions to support growing user demands while maintaining system reliability.
• Lead the design and enhancement of monitoring frameworks, ensuring systems are highly observable, and support the response to production incidents.
• Take ownership of improving system resilience by designing fault-tolerant architectures and implementing disaster recovery strategies.
• Lead capacity planning initiatives to ensure system resources are proactively managed, preventing downtime or performance degradation under high load.
• Work closely with development, operations, and other technical teams to ensure seamless system integration and align on best practices for reliability.
• Act as a technical mentor within the organization, guiding teams through complex reliability challenges and promoting a culture of excellence.
• Help define and execute long-term reliability engineering strategies and standards to ensure the scalability and performance of core services.
• Develop and enforce best practices for operational excellence, including automation, incident management, and system monitoring, across engineering teams.

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

Key Responsibilities 

Standards & Governance 

• Define mobile-specific SLIs and SLOs (e.g., crash-free sessions, ANRs, app startup time, network success rates, battery/memory usage). 
• Establish best practices for observability, alerting, and incident response in Datadog. 
• Drive consistency in how mobile reliability is measured and tracked across teams. 

Tooling & Automation 

• Lead the development of automation and tools for mobile reliability, including: 
• Automated regression detection and performance benchmarking. 
• Crash/ANR triage systems that integrate with Datadog and Crashlytics. 
• Release health dashboards and alerting bots. 
• Instrumentation libraries for consistent telemetry across iOS/Android apps. 
• Ensure tooling aligns with existing systems (Harness for CI/CD, Gradle/Bazel for builds). 

Cross-Team Leadership 

• Act as the primary liaison with backend/web SRE leadership to ensure seamless incident response and shared visibility into cross-system issues. 
• Partner with Release Engineering, QA, and Product to ensure new features meet operational readiness requirements. 
• Influence architecture and design decisions to prioritize mobile reliability at the planning stage. 

Cultural Change Agent 

• Lead the shift for mobile engineers to take ownership of reliability, performance, and availability. 
• Define and roll out the on-call model for mobile teams, including training and escalation practices. 
• Champion a blameless postmortem culture, ensuring continuous improvement in how we handle mobile incidents. 
• Mentorship & Team Building 
• Mentor and guide a distributed team of senior Mobile SREs (US and India). 
• Provide technical leadership in complex incidents, ensuring issues are addressed efficiently and lessons are institutionalized. 
• Help recruit and onboard new SREs, setting the tone for team culture and technical excellence. 
• Strategic Enablement 
• Partner with infrastructure and developer productivity teams to integrate Bazel and Gradle builds into a reliable CI/CD pipeline (Harness). 
• Establish long-term roadmaps for mobile reliability and influence company-wide reliability goals. 

 

Qualifications 

Required 

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, SRE, or mobile systems roles. 
• Strong understanding of iOS and/or Android performance and reliability challenges. 
• Hands-on experience with Datadog (or equivalent observability platforms) for monitoring, alerting, and dashboards. 
• Proven ability to define and implement SLIs/SLOs across complex, distributed systems. 
• Experience leading on-call rotations, incident response, and postmortems. 
• Demonstrated experience building automation and internal tools for reliability. 
• Strong programming skills in Python, Go, or similar, with working knowledge of Swift/Kotlin for client instrumentation. 
• Exceptional ability to influence and partner across engineering, product, and SRE orgs. 
• Track record of mentoring engineers and leading distributed teams. 

Preferred 

• Experience with CI/CD for mobile (Harness, Fastlane, Jenkins). 
• Familiarity with Bazel and Gradle build systems. 
• Prior experience introducing cultural changes (e.g., adopting on-call or reliability practices) in a development org. 
• Strong knowledge of backend service reliability concepts, to bridge between client and server. 

Success in This Role Means 

• Mobile reliability metrics are well-defined, tracked, and consistently met. 
• Mobile development teams have adopted on-call and alerting practices, with clear operational ownership. 
• Automation and tools are in place to ensure release health, regression detection, and efficient incident response. 
• Cross-team incidents between mobile and backend SRE are handled smoothly, with no ownership gaps. 
• The mobile user experience measurably improves through fewer crashes, faster startup times, and improved stability. 
• The Mobile SRE team is seen as a trusted partner to both backend SRE and mobile engineering. 

Subsidiary:

PayPal

Travel Percent:

0

-

PayPal is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices.

Actual Compensation is based on various factors including but not limited to work location, and relevant skills and experience.

The total compensation for this practice may include an annual performance bonus (or other incentive compensation, as applicable), equity, and medical, dental, vision, and other benefits. For more information, visit https://www.paypalbenefits.com.

The US national annual pay range for this role is $137,500 to $236,500

PayPal does not charge candidates any fees for courses, applications, resume reviews, interviews, background checks, or onboarding. Any such request is a red flag and likely part of a scam. To learn more about how to identify and avoid recruitment fraud please visit https://careers.pypl.com/contact-us.

For the majority of employees, PayPal's balanced hybrid work model offers 3 days in the office for effective in-person collaboration and 2 days at your choice of either the PayPal office or your home workspace, ensuring that you equally have the benefits and conveniences of both locations.

Our Benefits:

At PayPal, we’re committed to building an equitable and inclusive global economy. And we can’t do this without our most important asset—you. That’s why we offer benefits to help you thrive in every stage of life. We champion your financial, physical, and mental health by offering valuable benefits and resources to help you care for the whole you.

We have great benefits including a flexible work environment, employee shares options, health and life insurance and more. To learn more about our benefits please visit https://www.paypalbenefits.com.

Who We Are:

Click Here to learn more about our culture and community.

Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion 

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, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.  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 [email protected].

Belonging at PayPal: 

Our employees are central to advancing our mission, and we strive to create an environment where everyone can do their best work with a sense of purpose and belonging. Belonging at PayPal means creating a workplace with a sense of acceptance and security where all employees feel included and valued. We are proud to have a diverse workforce reflective of the merchants, consumers, and communities that we serve, and we continue to take tangible actions to cultivate inclusivity and belonging at PayPal.

Any general requests for consideration of your skills, please Join our Talent Community.

We know the confidence gap and imposter syndrome can get in the way of meeting spectacular candidates. Please don’t hesitate to apply.