How PayPal’s consumer engineering head balances innovation with end user impact

Martin Brodbeck joined PayPal this past summer to lead the engineering group in charge of consumer-facing applications. The job comes with a whole set of unique challenges as the organization navigates an increasingly complex and competitive landscape, and new technologies like generative AI keep coming at them fast and furiously. 

Brodbeck, who is in charge of PayPal, Venmo and the company’s ad platform, oversees a team of close to 2000 engineers. Prior to joining PayPal, he was CTO at Priceline and has over 20 years of experience leading technology teams and driving product transformation.

“A lot of the job involves people leading, mentorship, building teams and building great platforms. I think what's unique and different about this compared to some of the other places I’ve worked, is really the product transformation for the company,” Brodbeck said.

With a big team, it means he has to empower and trust his charges because it’s impossible to micromanage at that scale, even if he wanted to. Instead, he concentrates on the cultural aspects of building a great engineering organization, which for him involves five key characteristics: empowerment, accountability, driving continuous innovation, failing fast and having fun at what you do.

With a team that large, it also involves writing a ton of code, but Brodbeck does not see coding copilots as an easy way out of that problem, especially for a group building consumer-facing applications. “I don't think those tools are where they need to be in terms of physically writing product features yet,” he said. 

But that doesn’t mean he can’t see ways for generative AI to help make his engineers more productive. “I think where AI can play a critical role is helping out with some of the repetitive tasks that are part of the software development process like writing functional tests, unit tests and integration testing.”

While he’s hiring engineers with AI expertise today to help design and build large language models internally, he sees the natural evolution of the profession moving towards every engineer having AI skills because the job is simply going to demand it. “At some point, every engineer is going to be a machine learning engineer. The next paradigm of development is designing and developing prompts against large language models, and you will have to be really good at writing those prompts,” he said.

Gartner thinks so too. In fact, the research firm reports that 56 percent of respondents to a Q42023 survey of software managers called AI the most in demand skill for this year, and the lack of people with the necessary talent the biggest gap. Gartner believes that by 2027, 80 percent of the engineering workforce will need to upskill to deal with the demands of generative AI. 

When to introduce new technologies

Whatever the next big thing happens to be, Brodbeck only introduces new technology into the mix when it makes sense, but he doesn’t believe in bringing in tech for tech’s sake. “At the end of the day, if it's not driving some kind of value for the consumer, then what's the point of doing it,” he asked. That’s why he looks for ways for new technologies to be aligned to a new product, new capabilities or making an existing process better for the end user.

Sometimes those innovations will come from an established vendor, sometimes from a startup. “If there's a startup out there that's going to drive value in providing unique capabilities and help us solve problems, we're more than willing to partner with them,” he said.

When it comes to evaluating startups, he looks at four key questions that he’s honed over 20 years of making technology buying decisions. “Number one, do you have a unique set of capabilities that can help us solve a problem? Two, how would this solution integrate into our existing tech stack? Three, how would you operate and support this thing at scale? And four, what's your feature roadmap for future capabilities we're going to need as part of this platform?”

While the company needs to integrate smoothly with PayPal’s tech stack, it’s up to Brodbeck to make sure that the tech stack can deal with new approaches. “Part of my job is to constantly be modernizing my own tech stack to enable it to be easily integrated into other platforms that sit within your company, or platforms that sit outside of it,” he said. 

Throughout his career, regardless of where he was working, Brodbeck says he has always analyzed how flexible and nimble the current tech stack is, while constantly looking at ways to improve it or make it more nimble.

All of Brodbeck’s decisions on technology, and that includes whether to work with startups or not, comes down to a delicate balance.“I think you have to balance innovation that's going to drive the business with the reality of the here and now, and what are the things that we're working on that are paramount to moving the business forward,” he said.  “So you try to balance both, and you try to sprinkle in the innovation where you think it is going to move the needle on some of these initiatives.”