Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Extensive experience with ML frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, or scikit-learn.
• Expertise in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and tools for data processing and model deployment.

Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications

• Domain
• 1. Knowledge of Credit, Payments or any other financial product or services domain
• Generative AI
• Deep expertise in foundation model development using transformer architectures, including pretraining strategies, model scaling, and optimization techniques
• Proficient in LLM fine-tuning methodologies including supervised fine-tuning (SFT), RLHF, REFT, DPO, and parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA and QLoRA
• Strong experience designing and implementing LLM guardrails, including safety filters, output validation, toxicity detection, and policy enforcement frameworks
• Recommendation Systems
• Deep experience in building large scale recommender systems for product/content recommendation
• Solid understanding of foundation models for recommendation systems, including architectures such as Transformers4Rec
• Experience with RL based recommenders such as Multi-armed bandits is an added plus
• Agentic AI
• Hands-on experience building production-grade Agentic AI applications, including multi-agent orchestration, tool use, memory systems, and autonomous reasoning pipelines
• Ability to pick up new agentic AI frameworks
• Technical Leadership
• Ability to provide technical direction and mentorship to cross-functional data science and engineering teams, driving architectural decisions and best practices across the AI stack
• Effective at translating business problems to AI solutions that can scale
• Other Attributes and Skills
• Brings creative, first-principles thinking to complex problems, confidently challenging established processes and conventions when better approaches exist
• Thrives in fast-moving, ambiguous environments, demonstrating sound judgment and adaptability as AI technologies and organizational priorities rapidly evolve
• Actively tracks cutting-edge developments in AI research — including latest publications, open-source releases, and emerging architectures — and synthesizes relevant advancements into actionable engineering insights
• Demonstrated ability to rapidly prototype and evaluate new AI capabilities, translating state-of-the-art research into proof-of-concepts that inform product and platform strategy
• Strong AI measurement skills with experience designing evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and metrics for model quality, fairness, robustness, and business impact
• Ability to define and track experimentation rigor — A/B testing, offline vs. online evaluation, and model monitoring in production environments

Travel Percent

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 comprehensive, choice-based programs, to support all aspects of personal wellbeing—physical, emotional, and financial—delivering meaningful value where it matters most. We strive to create a flexible, balanced work culture with a holistic approach to benefits, including generous paid time off, healthcare coverage for you and your family, and resources to create financial security and support your mental health.

Who We Are

Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

Belonging at PayPal