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 seeking a Director of Consumer Portfolio Growth DS to lead a team of highly skilled data scientists. This team serves as the connective tissue between Commercial, Marketing, Product, and Finance, powering PayPal’s consumer business with insights that shape strategy and execution.
In this role, you will: Build deep expertise in the consumer funnel, uncovering and explaining the drivers of acquisition, engagement, and retention across products, segments, and markets. Translate complex data into powerful stories and actionable insights that influence senior leaders. Foster a culture of curiosity, innovation, and data-driven decision-making.
This is a high-visibility position that requires both analytical depth and the ability to inspire confidence and action through storytelling.
Job Description:
**Essential Responsibilities: **
- Partner with Commercial, Product, Marketing, Finance, and cross-functional teams to inform, influence, support, and execute strategy and monetization decisions for the Consumer business.
- Lead a team of talented data scientists responsible for monitoring PayPal customer funnel trend (activation, engagement, etc.), investigating and explaining drivers of change
- Develop a deep understanding of PayPal’s overall business (e.g., products, geographies, business model, value prop)
- Identify key business levers, establish cause & effect, perform analyses, and communicate key indings to various stakeholders to facilitate data-driven decision making
- Discover new opportunities to grow and optimize the business through analytics, financial modeling, and business case development
- Roll up your sleeves and work with large quantities of data using SQL and Excel, apply statistical programming languages like Python, and visualize content through executive-ready PowerPoint and/or other reporting tools
- Understand what matters most and prioritize ruthlessly
- Be comfortable with ambiguity and frequent context-switching in a fast-paced environment
- Leverage AI Pipelines to Automate Insights at scale and bring deep analytics into consumer growth domain.
Basic Qualifications :
- Data-driven mindset with degree in a quantitative discipline such as Computer Science, Statistics, Engineering, Mathematics, or Economics
- Fluent in SQL, Excel, and visualization tools such as Tableau or Looker; familiarity with a statistical programming language (e.g., R, Python) preferred
- Ability to leverage LLMs and Agentic AI in Insights automation workflows.
- Being able to build Machine Learning Models for causal inference and growth modeling in offline and production environment.
- Ability to work proactively and independently in a fast-paced environment and juggle competing priorities
- 12+ years of work experience in similar roles including 6+ years of people management experience.
- Intellectual curiosity and drive, decisiveness, and comfort with ambiguity and complexity.
- Ability to work effectively with multiple stakeholders and cross-functionally.
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills to influence cross-functional teams
This role offers the opportunity to directly shape the future of PayPal’s consumer business, leveraging data and analytics to unlock new growth and empower hundreds of millions of customers worldwide.
Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications:
Your Day-to-Day
- Fine-tune large language models (LLMs) for Venmo-specific use cases, ensuring robust alignment, safety, and personalization.
Implement and extend agentic frameworks such as A2A (Agent-to-Agent), MCP (Model Context Protocol), LangGraph, or similar, to enable complex, multi-agent interactions.
Perform advanced context and prompt engineering, optimizing model responses and orchestrating multi-turn, multi-source interactions.
Collaborate closely with product, design, and platform engineering teams to shape Venmo’s next-generation Agentic product capabilities and AI interface roadmap.
Experiment with reinforcement learning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and online adaptation to improve agent behavior and response quality.
Develop scalable, production-ready LLM and agentic pipelines, including data preparation, model training, evaluation, and continuous improvement.
Communicate insights and technical trade-offs clearly across technical and business teams to guide decision-making and influence Venmo’s broader AI strategy.
What You’ll Bring
Master’s degree (or higher) in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative discipline.
7+ years of relevant industry experience (or 6+ years with a PhD).
Deep understanding of Transformer architectures and hands-on experience with fine-tuning LLMs for production use cases.
Strong proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
Demonstrated experience with Agentic frameworks such as A2A, MCP, LangGraph, or LangChain, and an understanding of Agent-Oriented Design patterns.
Experience building context-aware conversational systems, integrating multi-source data for reasoning and response generation.
Familiarity with evaluation methods for LLMs and agentic systems, including prompt testing, offline metrics, and human feedback loops.
Experience with MLOps and LLMOps workflows, including model deployment, monitoring, and iterative retraining at scale.
Excellent communication skills with the ability to collaborate across engineering, research, and product teams.
Why Join Us
You’ll be part of the team pioneering Consumer Portfolio Growth Data Science — building AI systems that think, adapt, and act on behalf of users to simplify financial interactions.
This is a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of machine learning, LLM research, and human-centered product design, driving the evolution of one of the most trusted financial brands in the world.
Subsidiary:
PayPal
Travel Percent:
0
- The base pay for this role will depend on where you work and the relevant experience and expertise you bring. The expected range of pay for this role by location is:
Primary Location | Pay Range:
San Jose, California | ($218,000.00 - $323,950.00 Annually)
Additional Location(s) | Pay Range:
No other locations are assigned to this requisition currently.
Additional compensation for this role may include an annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation, as applicable.
PayPal does not charge candidates any fees for courses, applications, resume reviews, interviews, background checks, or onboarding. When making an application directly, we will never ask you to share passwords, one-time passcodes (OTP), or verification codes. Any such request is a red flag and likely part of a scam. All communication regarding your application will come from official PayPal email domains. If you suspect fraudulent activity, please report it immediately. 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 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:
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 paypalglobaltalentacquisition@paypal.com.
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.