James Barrese

With more than 25 years of technology experience that spans the military, the academic world, business consulting, and enterprise platforms and infrastructure, PayPal chief technology officer James Barrese is uniquely qualified to lead the company’s efforts to transform payments with innovative products and services for consumers and businesses.

A graduate of Stanford, James served as a high-frequency communications specialist for the U.S. Army Signal Corp, spent time as a programmer at Stanford, worked for Andersen Consulting, and then joined the e-philanthropy company Charitableway as vice president of engineering. In 2001, James joined eBay. Leading a number of strategic technology initiatives, he last served eBay as the vice president in charge of delivering the open platforms, infrastructure, systems software, analytics and site operations running the world’s largest marketplace at scale.

In 2011, James moved over to PayPal, first as vice president of global product development, and, beginning in 2012, as chief technology officer. With his mobile-first approach and his commitment to creating customer experiences that make things simpler and easier, he heads the world-class teams of technologists who are creating the products, platforms and technology infrastructure to power PayPal’s innovative payment services for tens of thousands of merchants and millions of account holders around the world.