This role sits within eBay Live, eBay's live shopping platform-an emerging, high-growth experience that blends real-time commerce, community, and storytelling. Live shopping is already well established in APAC and is rapidly expanding across the US and Europe, particularly in categories like collectibles, fashion, and unique inventory.
As a backend-focused team, we design and operate the core services, APIs, and data platforms that enable real-time interactions between buyers, sellers, creators, and inventory at scale. We work in an agile, highly collaborative environment, adapting quickly and continuously improving how we build and deliver software.
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Backend to help design, build, and evolve the backend systems powering eBay Live.
This is a senior individual contributor role with meaningful technical ownership, influence on architecture and design decisions, and expectations around mentoring and technical leadership.
You'll work on high-traffic, always-on systems, partner closely with product and platform teams, and play a key role in shaping how live commerce integrates into the broader eBay ecosystem.
What you'll do and learn:- Design, build, and own scalable backend services and APIs that support real-time, high-volume e-commerce experiences
- Translate product and business requirements into robust technical designs, balancing performance, reliability, and long-term maintainability
- Take end-to-end ownership of subsystems within a large domain, including design, development, testing, deployment, observability, and operational support
- Lead by example through high-quality code, thoughtful design reviews, and strong engineering judgment
- Identify architectural gaps or cross-system issues, propose solutions, and help define the engineering roadmap
- Drive improvements in testability, CI/CD, and delivery velocity, including E2E testing strategies
- Participate in and help lead on-call and production support for a 24/7 global platform
- Mentor and coach other engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and technical guidance
- Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and partner teams to deliver impactful features aligned with eBay's technical standards and goals
Qualifications:- 5+ years of professional backend software engineering experience
- Strong experience building distributed systems and APIs using Java and modern backend frameworks (e.g., Spring / Spring Boot)
- Hands-on experience with RESTful APIs, GraphQL, and messaging systems
- Experience building data-driven applications, including RDBMS and NoSQL databases (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, DynamoDB, ElasticSearch)
- Experience working in fast-paced, agile environments with CI/CD, automated testing, and modern DevOps practices
- Ability to break down complex problems, make sound technical decisions, and clearly communicate trade-offs
Preferred Experience:- Experience building real time, user facing systems (e.g., live streaming, chat, bidding, collaboration tools, gaming, or financial trading) where latency and errors materially impact user trust and outcomes.
- Background working on high traffic, event driven products (launches, flash sales, live events) with an understanding of infrastructure capacity planning, traffic spikes, and graceful degradation under load.
- Lead root-cause analysis and implement long-term fixes across platform to eliminate recurring issues and continuously elevate the customer experience.
- Websocket and FGQL experience a plus.
Additional DetailsThe base pay range for this position is expected in the range below:
$172,000 - $229,600
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 401(k) eligibility and 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.
If hired, employees will be in an "at-will position" and the Company reserves the right to modify base salary (as well as any other discretionary payment or compensation program) at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, Company or individual department/team performance, and market factors.
