Join the Search Backend team that builds and operates the core services powering eBay Search at scale. We develop reliable, high-performance backend systems to retrieve, rank, and serve relevant results for millions of buyers globally. These systems help buyers find what they need fast and enable smooth end-to-end shopping experiences.
Our work sits at the heart of eBay's marketplace and directly impacts customer satisfaction, seller success, and business growth. We are also increasingly accepting methods involving artificial intelligence and support tools to improve how search systems are built, optimized, and evolved for the future.
We're looking for a Member of Technical Staff 1, Backend to own the development and delivery of backend solutions. These solutions improve how shopper intent is translated into fast, relevant, and reliable search experiences. In this role, you will take ownership of a specific domain and drive technical execution from building through production. You will collaborate across product, engineering, and applied science to deliver scalable, high-quality solutions with measurable impact. You'll also help the team adopt AI-first engineering practices and modern development workflows where they can improve productivity, quality, and customer outcomes.
At Search, we pride ourselves on our collaborative, transparent, and inclusive culture, where every voice is valued, and collective growth is celebrated.
What You'll Do And Learn:
- Design and deliver backend capabilities that turn shopper intent into optimized search queries and high-quality search results at scale.
- Own a functional area across design, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and operational excellence in production.
- Translate product goals and feature requirements into technical designs, execution plans, and well-scoped work that can be delivered efficiently by you and your teammates.
- Partner across multiple engineering and product teams to define interfaces, evaluate trade-offs, resolve dependencies, and drive measurable improvements in relevance, latency, reliability, and developer efficiency.
- Improve the quality and scalability of the team's systems by driving observability, test automation, resilience, and continuous improvement in code, architecture, and operational practices.
- Identify and address technical debt, design gaps, and workflow inefficiencies before they become blockers, helping the team move faster and operate more effectively.
What You Will Bring:
- Strong backend development experience in Java (Java 17+ preferred) and production service development with Spring Boot or similar frameworks, with the ability to design extensible, maintainable, and scalable systems.
- 6+ years of hands-on involvement in Java, Spring/Springboot, REST APIs, messaging systems and/or other backend programming languages.
- An AI-first mentality, with experience or strong interest in using AI-assisted development and testing tools to accelerate delivery, improve quality, and help drive responsible AI workflows across the team.
- Experience owning a particular area or multiple subsystems across building, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and production support in a large, modular codebase.
- Proven ability to translate product and composition requirements into practical technical builds and implementation strategies, and deliver high-quality backend solutions with a high degree of autonomy.
- Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including API design, latency and throughput trade-offs, resilience patterns, scalability, reliability, and observability through metrics, logging, and tracing.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, capable of clarifying assumptions, estimating and prioritising work, influencing technical discussions, and guiding multi-functional partners through options and trade-offs.
Nice to Have:
- Experience with search and retrieval concepts such as query processing, ranking and sorting, facets and aspects, workflow orchestration systems, or relevance experimentation frameworks.
- Solid understanding of GraphQL
- Experience with Kafka
Additional DetailsThe base pay range for this position is expected in the range below:
C$142,400 - C$190,100
Base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including location, skills, and experience. The total compensation package for this position may also include other elements, including a target bonus and restricted stock units (as applicable) in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits (including RRSP eligibility, various paid time off benefits, such as PTO and parental leave). Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.
This job posting relates to an existing vacancy within eBay.
