Senior Software Engineer Full Stack at PayPal
Chicago, IL
$153,317–$221,500from the description
Jul 16, 2026
Chicago, IL
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A full-stack senior engineering role focused on maintaining and improving a merchant onboarding platform, building and operating backend microservices, and contributing to release planning alongside principal architects. The work is heavily backend-oriented, centered on Java, Spring Boot, RESTful APIs, event-driven messaging, and CI/CD pipelines, making it a strong fit for experienced engineers with a distributed-systems background.
Senior level · 5+ years · Remote · Bachelor's required · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
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 21,000 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 12,600–31,400
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
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 (8)
The job posting lists Chicago, IL as the primary work location with partial telecommuting permitted; however, per caller instruction this is being treated as fully remote with no metro assigned.
The degree requirement is a hard gate: Bachelor's degree (or foreign equivalent) in Computer Science, Engineering, or a closely related field is explicitly required with no 'or equivalent experience' escape clause.
All nine Special Skill Requirements carry explicit year demands and are listed under a 'Minimum Requirements' / 'Special Skill Requirements' heading, making them hard gates.
'Troubleshoot and optimize backend systems for performance' and 'Monitoring, Observability, Profiling and optimization for distributed systems' are both stated as 5-year requirements but name no specific tool; they are captured under 'distributed systems' as the closest concrete technical concept. No specific monitoring tool (e.g. Datadog, Prometheus) is named.
The posting notes 'Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications' but lists no actual preferred skills — only EEO and compensation language follows that heading.
Compensation includes potential annual performance bonus and equity in addition to the stated base range.
The role requires candidates to be legally authorized to work in the US without sponsorship.
Caller marked this a fully-remote role — scored against the national candidate pool.
Read the full posting
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