Senior Staff Software Eng. Data Platform

At eBay, we're more than a global ecommerce leader — we’re changing the way the world shops and sells. Our platform empowers millions of buyers and sellers in more than 190 markets around the world. We’re committed to pushing boundaries and leaving our mark as we reinvent the future of ecommerce for enthusiasts. Our customers are our compass, authenticity thrives, bold ideas are welcome, and everyone can bring their unique selves to work — every day. We're in this together, sustaining the future of our customers, our company, and our planet. Join a team of passionate thinkers, innovators, and dreamers — and help us connect people and build communities to create economic opportunity for all. ABOUT THE TEAM The Unified Feature Store (UFS) team at eBay, part of the Golden DataSet Platform (GDS) initiative, is building the next generation of eBay's AI and decisioning platform. We are developing a declarative, self-service platform that enables engineers to define, discover, compute, validate, and serve features consistently across both training and real-time inference. Our mission is to eliminate feature duplication, ensure training-serving parity, and provide reliable, scalable, and low-latency feature infrastructure that powers fraud detection, payments, search, personalization, and other mission-critical experiences across eBay. ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to help shape the architecture and technical direction of eBay's Unified Feature Store. In this role, you will design and build the distributed systems that power feature computation, storage, serving, and lifecycle management at massive scale. Your work will directly improve developer productivity, accelerate AI model delivery, and establish UFS as the single source of truth for feature engineering across eBay. While familiarity with feature stores, stream processing, and data infrastructure is valuable, your primary focus will be on building the distributed platform itself, solving challenging problems in scalability, consistency, reliability, and low-latency serving. If you're passionate about large-scale distributed systems, backend infrastructure, platform architecture, and solving hard scalability problems, this is the right team for you. WHAT YOU'LL ACCOMPLISH * Own the architecture, design, and development of large-scale distributed services powering eBay's AI and decisioning infrastructure. * Build core platform services for stream processing, state management, feature serving, and distributed computation. * Solve distributed systems challenges in exactly-once processing, fault tolerance, scalability, online/offline consistency, and high-throughput processing. * Develop reusable frameworks, runtimes, and self-service tooling for distributed platforms. * Drive architecture decisions across scaling, reliability, consistency, partitioning, idempotency, and fault isolation. * Improve observability, alerting, incident response, and operational excellence for critical platform services. * Lead capacity planning, performance optimization, and cost efficiency for distributed systems. * Build automation and tooling that simplify deployment, debugging, and recovery. * Partner with engineering and product teams to deliver scalable platform solutions. * Lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and raise the bar for distributed systems engineering. * Eliminate architectural debt, scalability bottlenecks, and reliability gaps through platform modernization. WHAT YOU BRING * BS/MS in Computer Science (or related field) with 10+ years (or MS with 8+ years) building large-scale distributed systems or platform infrastructure. * Proven experience designing and operating high-throughput, low-latency, production-grade distributed services. * Deep knowledge of distributed systems, including partitioning, replication, consistency, concurrency, idempotency, backpressure, and failure recovery. * Strong programming skills in Java, Python, Go, or similar languages. * Experience building platform services, frameworks, APIs, libraries, or runtime infrastructure. * Hands-on expertise with Kafka, Flink, Spark and RDBMS/NoSQL. * Experience operating production systems, including observability, performance tuning, incident response, debugging, and on-call ownership. * Ability to make sound architectural trade-offs across correctness, reliability, performance, operability, and cost. * Experience designing clean interfaces, backward-compatible migrations, and safe rollout strategies. * Strong technical leadership, communication, mentorship, and cross-functional influence. Additional Details This job posting relates to an existing vacancy within eBay. 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, and disability, or other legally protected status. If you have a need that requires accommodation, please contact us at talent@ebay.com [talent@ebay.com]. We will make every effort to respond to your request for accommodation as soon as possible. View our accessibility statement [https://ebayinc.com/accessibility/] to learn more about eBay's commitment to ensuring digital accessibility. We use cookies to enhance your experience and may use AI tools for administrative tasks in the hiring process. To learn how we handle your personal data and use AI responsibly, please visit our Talent Privacy Notice [https://jobs.ebayinc.com/us/en/talent-privacy-notice], Privacy Center [https://www.ebayinc.com/company/privacy-center/], and AI Hiring Guidelines [https://jobs.ebayinc.com/us/en/how-we-hire].

The Senior MTS Software Engineer will lead the architectural vision and technical strategy for eBay’s Core Data platform, driving scalable, intelligent, and cost-efficient systems for data pipeline building and management. Responsibilities include independently leading complex initiatives, owning and evolving core data platform architecture, and championing engineering excellence through design, code reviews, and mentorship.

Candidates must have extensive experience owning large-scale distributed data platforms (multi-PB data, high-throughput streams) and a deep systems approach to reliability and design. Required qualifications include 12+ years in building distributed systems, 5+ years as a technical lead, proficiency in Java/Python, and hands-on expertise in data technologies like Kafka, Spark, and Kubernetes.

• Competitive compensation • Global benefits

• KubernetesPreferred
• JavaPreferred
• PythonPreferred

Identified from the job description. Confirm important requirements above.

• Distributed Data Platforms
• System Design
• Architecture Leadership
• Cost Optimization
• Framework Development
• Cloud-Native Paradigms
• Technical Mentorship
• AI-First Frameworks
• Java
• Python
• Kafka
• Flink
• Spark
• Delta
• Iceberg
• Kubernetes

• Data & Analytics
• Engineering
• Software
• Technology
• Management & Leadership

Minimum education

Bachelor’s degree

Minimum experience

10+ years

Posting language

English

Working hours

40 hours per week

Location requirements

Country, Canada