About the team and the role
The Search Backend team that builds and operates the core services powering eBay Search at scale. We build reliable, high-performance backend systems that retrieve, rank, and serve relevant results for a large global audience of buyers. These systems help users quickly find what they want and enable excellent 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 embracing AI-driven and AI-assisted approaches to improve how search systems are built, optimized, and evolved for the future.
We're looking for a Member of Technical Staff 2, Backend to lead the invention and delivery of server-side functionality. This improves how shopper intent is translated into fast, relevant, and reliable search experiences. In this role, you will take ownership of a functional area. You will drive technical execution from build through production. You will collaborate across product, engineering, and scientific research 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.
- Lead a key operational segment covering architecture, development, verification, rollout, supervision, and operational excellence in production.
- Develop technical compositions, execution plans, and scalable solutions based on product goals and business requirements that balance time to market with long-term quality, maintainability, and extensibility.
- Partner across multiple engineering, product, and applied science teams to define interfaces, evaluate trade-offs, resolve dependencies, and drive measurable improvements in relevance, latency, reliability, and developer efficiency.
- Raise the quality and scalability of the team's systems by driving observability, test automation, resilience, and continuous improvement in code, architecture, and operational practices.
- Proactively identify and address technical debt, design gaps, and workflow inefficiencies before they become blockers, helping the team move faster and operate more effectively at scale.
What You Will Bring
- Strong backend development experience in Java (Java 17+ preferred) and production service development with Spring Boot or similar frameworks. Skilled in crafting extensible, maintainable, and scalable systems designed for high-traffic environments.
- 8+ years of hands-on involvement in Java, Spring/Springboot, REST APIs, messaging systems and/or other backend programming languages.
- An AI-first attitude, with experience or strong interest in leveraging AI-assisted development and testing tools to accelerate delivery, improve quality, and help drive responsible AI workflows across the team.
- Experience owning multiple subsystems or a major functional area across design, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and production support in a large, modular codebase.
- Proven ability to convert product goals and business requirements into practical technical builds and execution plans. Proficient at designing scalable backend solutions. Makes sound trade-offs across complexity, performance, and long-term maintainability.
- Strong 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, with the ability to influence technical direction, clarify trade-offs, align cross-functional partners, and drive execution across teams and dependencies.
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 DetailsThis job posting relates to an existing vacancy within eBay.
