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.

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