Senior Manager, Operational Excellence & AI Operations

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:

This leader owns operational excellence across Enterprise Systems & Employee Technology. That means the standards the estate runs on, one central view of how it performs — including every AI agent we run — and the accountability of each value stream and platform to its operational metrics, autonomy targets, ServiceNow adoption and productivity goals.

ESET (Enterprise Systems & Employee Technology) serves Finance, Sales, People, Legal and Core IT through business-aligned value streams, service streams and shared platforms. This role sits in the Strategy, Portfolio and Operational Excellence office of the Chief of Staff and reports to me (Pallavi Deshpande). It works horizontally across all value streams, service streams and platforms.

Job Description:

Essential Responsibilities:

• Provide strategic oversight and management of program operations, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and driving innovation within the DCCE (Data Center & Cloud Evolution) space.
• Oversee the traceability of data center assets, including power and space considerations, to ensure accurate planning and optimization driven by program outcomes.
• Partner with business unit teams to strategically plan and implement initiatives that address technical debt, optimize underutilized resources, and improve data center workload efficiency.
• Monitor and report on cloud-driven workload transformations, aligning efforts to optimize data center operations and reduce redundant resource utilization.
• Evaluate and refine processes within operations, leading initiatives to build and implement the next level of operational improvements.
• Manage and control production applications and services across all PayPal CN data centers, ensuring high availability and operational excellence.
• Ensure site reliability by leading efforts to resolve cross-border operational issues in collaboration with global, cross-functional teams.
• Create and implement robust processes to enhance production stability, leveraging software development to support production operations effectively.
• Lead system monitoring initiatives by establishing standard monitoring policies, supporting event processing, and driving timely issue resolution to maintain operational integrity.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 8+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Experience leading others

Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications:

Job Summary

This leader owns operational excellence across Enterprise Systems & Employee Technology. That means the standards the estate runs on, one central view of how it performs — including every AI agent we run — and the accountability of each value stream and platform to its operational metrics, autonomy targets, ServiceNow adoption and productivity goals.

ESET serves Finance, Sales, People, Legal and Core IT through business-aligned value streams, service streams and shared platforms. Most Level 1 and Level 2 work is delivered by managed-service partners, and a growing share by AI agents. This role makes that model run predictably and transparently, with less human touch each year.

The role partners with the Director, Autonomous Operations, who owns end-user support and the service desk. This role covers applications and the end-to-end view on top, and sets the standards both follow. It also drives developer and consultant productivity: it identifies, enables and tracks the tools that augment every engineer, analyst and consultant, and measures whether they are adopted.

The role owns operational excellence across ESET: the standards the estate runs on, one central view of how it performs (including every AI agent we run), and each value stream's and platform's accountability to its operational metrics, autonomy targets, ServiceNow adoption and productivity goals. Most Level 1 and Level 2 work is delivered by managed-service partners and a growing share by AI agents; this role makes that model run predictably and transparently, with less human touch each year. It partners with the Director, Autonomous Operations (end-user support and service desk) and is the Run-side counterpart to the Senior Manager, Program Management, Strategy & AI-Enabled Delivery.

The role sets the standard, publishes the numbers, and holds leaders and their vendors to their targets. Those leaders own execution. This role owns the standard, the measurement and the escalation.

Success looks like one operational standard across the estate, every value stream running ITSM and CMDB in ServiceNow with clean data, one view of every agent in production, autonomy targets met and converted to cost reduction, tools adopted rather than just licensed, and audits passed with evidence the system produces on its own.

Essential Responsibilities include:

• Run operating standards — Define and own the standards for incident, major incident, problem, change, request, knowledge and CMDB/asset management that every value stream and platform follows. One standard, federated execution.

• Operational accountability — Run the scorecard that grades each value stream and platform on availability, MTTR, MTTD, change success, incident recurrence, corrective-action closure and CMDB data quality. Set targets, RAG bands and named owners. Chair the standing operational review, separate from the portfolio review. Escalate misses and drive remediation to closure.

• Agent visibility across ESET — Maintain one central view of every AI agent run across all value streams and platforms: inventory, owner, purpose, performance, cost, incidents and controls. Set the standard for registering, monitoring and retiring agents. Report the view to ESET leadership.

• AI Ops — Drive AIOps and agent-based workflows across applications and infrastructure: alert triage, runbook automation, incident investigation and post-incident review. Keep a ranked automation pipeline, require safeguards and traceability, and report realized benefit, not activity.

• End-to-end autonomy targets — Partner with the Director, Autonomous Operations, who owns autonomy for end-user support and the service desk. Cover applications and the end-to-end view on top. Set and baseline yearly autonomy targets (human-touch reduction) for L1 and L2, track milestones by service area, ticket pattern and technology, and tie service cost reduction to autonomy actually attained.

• Developer and consultant productivity — Identify the tools that make each role more productive, and work with platform owners to enable them. Track adoption and productivity outcomes by value stream and platform. Make sure every engineer, analyst and consultant is augmented, and that the tools are used well, not just licensed.

• Major incident and problem governance — Coordinate executive-level escalations. Move the estate from post-incident review to proactive root-cause resolution, with owners and corrective actions tracked to closure.

• Change governance — Chair the change governance forum and report change-success and emergency-change trends to executive leadership.

• ServiceNow adoption — Make sure every value stream fully adopts ServiceNow for ITSM, CMDB and related workflows, on both process and data. Process: incident, change, problem and request run in the platform, not in side tools or email. Data: complete, owned and accurate CIs against the CMDB data-quality standard — coverage, ownership, accuracy. Measure adoption by value stream, work gaps with the platform owner and value stream leaders, and report it in the scorecard.

• Vendor service performance — Hold managed-service providers to SLAs, OLAs and contracted autonomy milestones. Run service reviews with Sourcing and the responsible leaders.

• Executive visibility — Own the operational data model and executive reporting, including the control-tower view. One source of truth, an auditable evidence trail, no hand-built decks.

• Audit and control — Represent operations in internal and external audits. Build evidence collection into the scorecard and automate controls where feasible.

• Executive advisory and coaching — Advise ESET leadership on run-side risk, remediation priorities and the operating-model implications of the numbers. Coach operations leads and engineers on SLOs, incident response, observability and production readiness.

Top Required Skills & Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience
• [8+] years in enterprise IT operations, service management: ITSM across incident, problem, change and CMDB; ServiceNow strongly preferred, including driving platform adoption and data quality across business units.
• Operational governance without direct authority: led governance across multiple organizations or vendors, built a scorecard or standard that changed behavior, and managed outsourced or multi-vendor service performance against SLAs and contracted targets.
• AI Ops and automation outcomes: delivered measurable automation or AIOps results (ticket deflection, MTTR reduction, cost reduction) and governed or monitored AI agents or automation in production (inventory, performance, cost, controls).
• Hands-on with observability and incident tooling (Splunk, Datadog, Dynatrace or similar);
• Working knowledge of audit and control frameworks (SOC 1/2, ISO 27001, SOX IT general controls); drove adoption of engineering or productivity tooling and measured the outcome.

Nice to have

• Financial services or another regulated environment

• Applying AI agents or LLM-driven workflows to operations

• Digital employee-experience tooling (Nexthink or similar) and service-desk automation
• ITIL 4 Managing Professional, Lean Six Sigma, SRE or cloud credentials

Subsidiary:

PayPal

Travel Percent:

0

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.