Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

eBay•Austin, TX

1d•$118,800 - $205,600•Onsite

About The Position

This role is for a Distributed Systems Engineer in Austin, TX, focusing on designing, building, and operating highly available, fault-tolerant systems to strengthen platform trust, resilience, and security within eBay's cloud infrastructure. The position is within the Cloud Security Engineering team, which builds security services for identity, access control, data protection, and policy enforcement at a global scale. The team operates in an AI-first environment, utilizing autonomous coding assistants like Claude Code and Cursor as standard tools for development, implementation, review, and operation. The ideal candidate will not only use these tools effectively but also possess strong judgment regarding the necessary guardrails for their safe application in security-critical environments.

Requirements

7+ years of software engineering experience passionate about distributed systems.
A bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field is required.
Strong programming skills in Java and/or Go are required.
Proven knowledge of distributed computing fundamentals such as replication, consistency models, leader election, consensus, and fault tolerance.
Hands-on experience building production software with agentic coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor, including use of CLI and headless workflows for scripting, automation, and delivery.
Practical judgment in AI-assisted development, including the ability to define verification, testing, review, and permission guardrails so AI-generated changes meet production and security standards.
Experience designing systems using microservices, event-driven, or component-based architectures.
Hands-on work with SQL and NoSQL datastores and distributed messaging systems.

Nice To Haves

Experience building security or infrastructure platforms such as IAM, policy engines, secrets management, or encryption services.
Familiarity with MCP, Kubernetes, service meshes, Zero Trust, cloud-native security patterns, or compliance-focused systems is a plus.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate cloud-scale distributed security services that improve the availability, scalability, and resilience of critical platform capabilities across eBay’s infrastructure.
Architect backend systems and APIs that perform efficiently under low-latency, high-reliability requirements, while handling failures gracefully across regions, services, and dependencies.
Use AI-first engineering workflows in daily development, applying agentic coding tools for design exploration, implementation, refactoring, testing, code review, and incident investigation to improve engineering velocity and quality.
Build and strengthen the guardrails for safe AI-assisted development on security-sensitive systems, including automated verification in CI, scoped permissions, sandbox execution, review patterns, and clear boundaries for agent behavior.
Design and operate MCP servers and integrations that connect AI agents to internal systems such as telemetry, runbooks, policy stores, deployment tooling, and ticketing, with strong authentication, authorization, scoping, and auditability.
Advance secure-by-design and operational excellence practices by improving observability, automating appropriate engineering toil, contributing to postmortems and design reviews, and mentoring others on effective and responsible use of AI in engineering.