Backend Staff Engineer

eBay•Toronto, ON

3d•CA$142,400 - CA$190,100•Remote

About The Position

At eBay, we're more than a global marketplace — we’re a place where millions of buyers and sellers connect every day through trusted, dynamic, and engaging commerce experiences. The eBay Auctions engineering team is on a multi-year journey to modernize one of eBay’s most iconic commerce experiences: auctions. Our mission is to bring the thrill of the game back to auction by building a real-time, trusted, and scalable platform that powers curated discovery, vibrant community, and fair bid play — where each item’s true market value can win out. This role sits at the center of that transformation. You will help build and evolve eBay’s next-generation auctions platform, a real-time, highly available backend system that powers both eBay Live Auctions and traditional auction experiences. This is a latency-sensitive, large-scale commerce platform where correctness, resiliency, scalability, and customer trust are critical. We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer who combines deep distributed-systems expertise with strong ownership, product judgment, and a passion for raising the engineering bar. You will lead complex technical initiatives end to end, influence architecture across teams, challenge assumptions respectfully, and help improve how the team designs, builds, tests, ships, and supports software — including through thoughtful AI adoption.

Requirements

6+ years of software engineering experience building backend, distributed, or large-scale platform systems.
Deep experience with Java, Spring/Spring Boot, REST or GraphQL APIs, messaging systems, and SQL or NoSQL data stores.
Strong distributed-systems judgment across scalability, availability, latency, resiliency, correctness, and production operations.
Proven ownership of complex technical initiatives from idea through production, with measurable customer or business impact.
Ability to influence architecture and execution across teams without relying on authority.
Strong product judgment, customer empathy, and the ability to connect technical decisions to user experience, trust, and business outcomes.
Clear communication, sound decision-making, and the ability to respectfully challenge assumptions while aligning teams.
A bias for improving how teams build, test, ship, and support software through better engineering practices, automation, and AI adoption.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Experience with event-driven systems, stateful platforms, real-time systems, or latency-sensitive commerce platforms is a plus.
Experience with GraphQL is preferred.
Experience improving engineering velocity through better testing, automation, observability, CI/CD, or AI-assisted engineering practices is a plus.

Responsibilities

Lead the design and evolution of scalable, low-latency backend systems that power eBay’s next-generation auctions platform.
Own large functional areas end to end, from architecture and implementation through launch, observability, and production operations.
Turn ambiguous product, customer, and platform problems into simple, durable technical strategies.
Influence technical direction across teams by communicating trade-offs, risks, and long-term platform implications.
Drive cross-functional execution with engineering, product, design, analytics, and partner teams to deliver high-impact customer outcomes.
Improve engineering velocity through better architecture, testing strategy, automation, CI/CD, observability, and AI-assisted engineering practices.
Raise the engineering bar through technical leadership, design reviews, code reviews, documentation, mentoring, and knowledge sharing.