Mandar Gaonkar | Senior Software Engineering Manager, Risk Platform
PayPal

Mandar Gaonkar is a Senior Engineering Manager at PayPal leading the Risk Platform organization. With over 12 years of experience at the intersection of software engineering, data science, and fraud risk, he builds platforms that detect and prevent account takeover, credential stuffing, scripted attacks, and bot abuse at payments scale. His work has delivered measurable outcomes, including significant reductions in scripted attacks, meaningful decreases in login friction through trusted device enablement, and measurable improvements in ATO and fraud loss rates. Prior to his current role, Mandar led the full-stack Device Intelligence & Bot Mitigation Platform — spanning iOS, Android, TypeScript, and Java backend — responsible for acquiring device signals and generating real-time risk insights to stop fraud. He is the inventor or co-inventor on multiple patents at PayPal spanning emulator detection, user agent anomaly detection via sentence embeddings, bot behavior analysis through pointer movement graphs, deep learning-based keylocker device verification, duplicate transaction detection, and AI-generated rule violation codebooks for explainable bot detection. He holds an M.S. in Information Systems from Northeastern University.