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eBay is a global commerce leader that connects millions of buyers and sellers around the world. We empower people and create economic opportunities for individuals, businesses, and communities. We're driven by a vision to create a more sustainable form of commerce that benefits the environment and society as a whole. Join us as we continue to innovate and shape the future of e-commerce.
Cloud Data Technologies (CDT) team at eBay is responsible for all the data infrastructure and management of end-to-end data lifecycle for all eBay data from onsite to analytics use cases. We are looking for strong backend infrastructure engineers who are passionate about building data systems that support our real-time, batch and AI systems.
About the Role
We are seeking a Sr. Software Engineers to lead the architectural vision and technical strategy for eBay’s Core Data platform organization. This is a pivotal role where you will drive scalable, intelligent, and cost-efficient systems that enable users to build pipelines and handle data seamlessly.Your work will establish the foundation for the future of eBay's data platform infrastructure.
We are seeking Data Platform Software Engineers, not Data Engineers. While familiarity with Spark, Flink, and other tools in the Hadoop environment is a definite advantage, your focus will be on building the data platform rather than just creating data pipelines.
If you are an engineer eager to gain an in-depth understanding of distributed data processing, this is the right team for you!
What you’ll do and learn
Independently lead complex, high-impact initiatives across eBay’s Data Platforms, from conception to successful production rollout. You will collaborate with Product Managers to help define the vision for the data platform at eBay.
Architectural Leadership: Own and evolve the architecture for core data platform systems, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, maintainable, and in alignment with enterprise standards.
System Design: Eliminate duplication across systems and ensure clear responsibility boundaries; align systems with business needs and future scalability.
Engineering Excellence: Champion clean architecture, promote use of modern frameworks, enforce quality gates, and ensure alignment to design patterns and coding standards.
Lead by Example: Write reference implementations, supply to core libraries, and conduct in-depth code reviews to influence standards and uplift team capabilities.
Cost Optimization: Propose and drive engineering solutions that reduce operational overhead, improve resource efficiency, and automate manual processes.
Framework Development: Find opportunities to build reusable components, services, and frameworks that accelerate feature delivery across the organization
Modernization: Lead migrations of legacy systems into modern architectures and cloud-native paradigms with minimal disruption and high impact.
Collaboration: Drive complex technical discussions, build consensus across engineering, product, and operational teams, and ensure smooth delivery of multi-functional projects.
Documentation & Governance: Create well-structured Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and contribute to user documentation and standards.
Proactively address performance, security, compliance, and future-proofing of solutions while balancing latency, correctness, scale, and cost.
Raise the engineering bar through design/code reviews, operational excellence (SLOs, observability, incident management), and scalable practices that increase velocity across teams.
Mentorship: Act as a technical mentor, guiding senior and junior engineers on architecture guidelines and advanced problem-solving.
Introduce AI-first frameworks and reusable components that reduce developer friction and enable faster iteration.
Automate diagnostics, monitoring, and remediation using intelligent assistants and prediction-based alerting.
Excellent in interpersonal communication
What you bring
Extensive experience owning large-scale distributed data platforms (multi-PB data, high-throughput streams, global systems).
Deep systems approach: you anticipate bottlenecks, design for reliability (reprocessing, idempotency, schema evolution), and think holistically across compute, storage, and APIs.
Excellent decision-making and communication skills, thriving in ambiguity while aligning diverse collaborators on the right path forward.
Security and compliance perspective, including data privacy, RBAC/ABAC, encryption, and auditability — with the ability to partner with compliance teams on regulatory requirements.
Confirmed leadership in mentoring engineers, shaping team culture, and driving organizational change in engineering practices.
Growth mindset: continuous learner who accepts new technologies, shares knowledge internally/externally, and adapts to evolving business priorities.
Why join us
High-impact mission: You will build and modernize eBay’s Data Platform, which powers analytics, experimentation, machine learning, personalization, and trust and compliance on a global scale.
Challenging technical problems: From real-time streaming at scale, to lakehouse correctness, governance, cost and performance optimization, and multi-cloud resiliency.
Vibrant culture: A collaborative, transparent, and inclusive environment where diverse perspectives are valued, knowledge sharing is encouraged, and every engineer has a voice.
Flexibility & support: Hybrid/remote-friendly practices, competitive compensation, global benefits (ebaybenefits.com), and support for learning resources, conferences, and career development.
Always-on responsibility with balance: While you’ll help lead reliability for critical services, we invest in strong operational practices and on-call sustainability.
Qualifications
12+ years of experience in building and operating large-scale distributed systems, with 5+ years as a staff/architect-level technical lead across multiple domains.
Proven success in driving technical strategy and roadmaps, authoring architecture and technical vision documents, and aligning team members across engineering, product, and compliance.
Strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems design.
Proficiency in Java/Python (or equivalent) and in infra-as-code, CI/CD, and containerized environments.
Hands-on deep internal expertise in several of the following: Kafka/Flink, Spark,, Delta/Iceberg, GraphQL/REST APIs, RDBMS/NoSQL, Kubernetes, Airflow.
Experience building both streaming and batch data platforms, improving reliability, quality, and developer velocity.
Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers, influence org-wide practices, and make long-term architectural decisions that unlock measurable business outcomes.
Additional Details
eBay is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, and disability, or other legally protected status. If you have a need that requires accommodation, please contact us at [email protected]. We will make every effort to respond to your request for accommodation as soon as possible. View our accessibility statement to learn more about eBay's commitment to ensuring digital accessibility for people with disabilities.
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