Software Engineer, Routing Platform

Software Engineer

PayPal's Routing Platform team maintains the L7 routing infrastructure that sits at the ingress boundary of PayPal's network, processing over 9 billion API calls daily with zero-downtime availability. We are looking for a passionate Software Engineer to join our team and help drive the modernization of our routing infrastructure — specifically leading the migration of existing Golang and Java-based routing platforms to the next-generation Kubernetes-native API gateway platform. This is a high-impact role where your work will directly influence the reliability, performance, and scalability of PayPal's routing systems.

What You'll Do

• Contribute to the technical migration of existing Golang and Java-based routing services to a next-generation Kubernetes-native API gateway platform, ensuring zero-downtime transitions
• Design, develop, and maintain cloud-native routing configurations, policies, and automation tooling including rate limiting, request/response transformation, and traffic shaping
• Implement modern authentication and authorization patterns including JWT, workload identity, and claims-based routing to enable secure service-to-service communication
• Develop and maintain observability tooling, dashboards, and alerting to ensure platform health
• Partner with cross-functional teams to validate routing requirements and ensure business continuity
• Contribute to self-service automation capabilities to reduce manual operational overhead across routing systems
• Participate in on-call rotations and support operational reliability of the Routing Platform

What We're Looking For

• 1+ year of software engineering experience with a focus on platform engineering and API gateway systems
• Proficiency in Golang and Java, with experience maintaining or migrating production-grade services
• Familiarity with API gateway platforms — experience with Envoy, Istio, Gloo Gateway, or kgateway is a strong plus
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies (GKE, EKS, or equivalent)
• Experience with modern security protocols including JWT, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, mTLS, and zero-trust principles in API gateway or service mesh environments
• Experience with performance benchmarking, latency analysis, and capacity planning for high-throughput distributed systems
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (Harness, Jenkins, or similar)
• Strong understanding of networking concepts: HTTP/2, gRPC, TLS, load balancing, and traffic management
• Experience with observability stacks such as DataDog, OpenTelemetry, or Prometheus

Nice to Have

• Experience with large-scale platform migrations in a high-traffic production environment
• Familiarity with Helm, Terraform, or GitOps-based deployment workflows
• Prior experience contributing to or working alongside open-source API gateway projects such as Envoy or kgateway
• Background in fintech or payments infrastructure

Why Join Us

• Own and influence architecture decisions on infrastructure that processes billions of dollars in transactions daily
• Be part of a team driving meaningful cloud modernization with real ownership and impact at one of the world's largest payment platforms
• Collaborate with industry-leading technology partners on cutting-edge API gateway and cloud-native infrastructure
• Grow your career within PayPal's engineering organization with competitive compensation, benefits, and opportunities to lead high-visibility initiatives

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