Sr Software Engineer at PayPal
Austin, TX
$139,152–$221,500from the description
Jul 16, 2026
Austin, TX
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior engineering role focused on designing and building large-scale distributed systems, with responsibilities spanning backend and frontend development, CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and the integration of agentic AI and LLM-based solutions. The position also involves setting technical standards, leading code and design reviews, and mentoring junior engineers. Suited to engineers with broad full-stack experience across a wide range of languages, frameworks, and data stores.
Senior level · 3+ years · Remote · Master's required · Full-time
Posted 12 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1,700 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 350–2,550
Applicant volume Light — Few people clear these requirements, so an application that does clear them gets looked at. Worth applying to even if you miss a nice-to-have.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
The caller has declared this a fully-remote role; the posting itself states 'partial telecommuting permitted from within a commutable distance' of Austin, TX and lists a hybrid 3-days-in-office model — remote=true has been set per caller instruction, and no metro has been recorded.
The JD hard-requires a Master's degree (or foreign equivalent) in CS/Engineering plus 3 years of experience. No 'or equivalent experience' substitution is offered, so the degree requirement is set to Masters.
All skill groups appear under the 'Special Skill Requirements' (minimum requirements) section of what reads as a formal DOL-style job posting, so every named technology is treated as a hard gate regardless of how niche some items are (e.g. Neo4j, LangGraph, Milvus, n8n). This is an unusually broad and exhaustive requirements list — likely driven by immigration/PERM filing conventions rather than genuine rejection criteria for all items.
n8n (workflow automation tool) was omitted as a skill because it is a workflow orchestration platform with no canonical single-word name widely recognized in the SOC skill taxonomy; however it appears in the AI/ML group alongside LangChain etc. — hiring managers should note it was listed in the original posting under the 1-year AI/ML requirement.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Server-Sent Events (SSE) and Protocol Buffers were omitted as standalone skills because they are sub-features/protocols rather than independently named tools; the parent capabilities (gRPC covers Protocol Buffers; REST/WebSocket cover SSE) are captured.
Harness (CI/CD platform) and Istanbul/NYC (code coverage) and Supertest (HTTP testing) were omitted as they are minor/supporting tools within the already-captured CI/CD and testing skill groups; the primary tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Jest, Cypress, Playwright, SonarQube) are captured.
The compensation range ($139,152–$221,500/year) is stated specifically for Austin, TX; actual pay for a remote hire in a different location may differ per the posting's own language.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): Google Cloud Pub/Sub.
Caller marked this a fully-remote role — scored against the national candidate pool.
Read the full posting
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