About the team and the role:
The Engineering Excellence team sits within the Buyer & Community Engineering organization and is focused on elevating how we build, ship, and operate software at scale. This Lead Technical Program manager is a hands-on role that partners closely with the Engineering Excellence lead, as well as senior engineering, product, and platform leaders, to turn our engineering strategy into concrete, repeatable programs. You will typically work across large, multi-domain initiatives involving tens to hundreds of engineers, and you will regularly engage with senior and executive stakeholders. This is a highly visible role for someone who thrives on solving complex cross-team engineering challenges, improving developer experience, and driving measurable improvements in quality, reliability, and velocity.
What you will accomplish:- Champion an engineering culture of continuous, meaningful improvement by designing and driving programs that deliver measurable, repeatable, and sustained gains in efficiency, execution, and process.
- Lead developer ergonomics and velocity initiatives (tooling, workflows, build/test optimization), running pilots, measuring impact, and scaling successful approaches across Buyer & Community Engineering.
- Drive essential engineering programs such as large-scale migrations (APIs, databases, applications), mandatory system upgrades, and platform modernization, coordinating with platform and application teams to remove blockers and unlock long-term reliability and velocity.
- Own targeted technical-debt remediation and architecture hygiene efforts, including dead-code and deprecation cleanups, architecture workshops, and ADR facilitation, and translate outcomes into concrete remediation plans with clear timelines.
- Act as a lead "unblocker" for high-risk programs by triaging issues, orchestrating cross-functional response, running remediation sprints, and codifying repeatable rescue patterns, including maintaining blocking lists and critical-issue playbooks.
- Define and maintain success metrics and dashboards (e.g., velocity, quality, SLO attainment, build/test savings) to prioritize Engineering Excellence investments and clearly demonstrate impact to engineering and executive partners.
What you will bring:- Around 8+ years of experience leading complex technical programs with a strong bias for engineering execution and delivery, ideally including reliability, migrations, or developer-experience initiatives.
- Strong technical proficiency, including comfort reading system builds, understanding technical tradeoffs and dependencies, and owning complex remediation or migration efforts in close partnership with architects and senior engineers.
- Proven operational rigor with a track record of improving incident/alerting practices, CI/CD and test pipelines, or structured tech-debt programs, with clear, measurable outcomes.
- Demonstrated cross-functional influence, with the ability to mobilize engineers, platform teams, SRE, and product partners to deliver cross-domain technical outcomes and effectively navigate blocking issues.
- Proficiency with data and tooling for insight and decision-making (e.g., spreadsheets, BI tools such as Looker/Tableau, and SQL), and familiarity with build systems, CI/CD pipelines, test instrumentation, and release tracking tools such as JIRA and Confluence.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience is preferred; openness to candidates with comparable experience who can operate in a senior, hands-on, program-driving capacity.
Additional DetailsThis job posting relates to an existing vacancy within eBay.
