Sr. Director - Distinguished Engineer

eBay•San Jose, CA

7d•$274,400 - $366,300

About The Position

At eBay, the C2C & Seller Experience Engineering team builds platforms and architectures that support millions of consumer-to-consumer and professional sellers globally. Reporting directly to the VP of Engineering, C2C & Seller Experiences, the Distinguished MTS is a high-impact technical individual contributor responsible for the end-to-end architectural integrity and technical strategy of the Seller journey. The role defines how eBay builds, scales, and transforms a high-scale legacy environment into a modern, decoupled ecosystem spanning web front-end, native iOS and Android, and backend architectures—primarily Kotlin and Java, with a strategic migration away from legacy Scala. The position combines strategic technical design with hands-on execution, with a focus on flow efficiency and colleague engagement. The C2C & Seller Experience Engineering team works in small, focused, collaborative project teams using an agile methodology. Multifunctional teams across product management, product development, quality, and user experience research and development work together daily. The environment is described as startup-like while offering the resources of a large company.

Requirements

Master’s degree in Computer Science, or a Bachelor’s degree with equivalent high-level architectural experience.
15–20+ years of relevant, broad engineering experience leading delivery of services and large-scale distributed systems.
Demonstrated success delivering large-scale enterprise-wide solutions from design through development, testing, and production.
Deep understanding of Java, Kotlin, and Scala in the JVM ecosystem, as well as modern web front-end (React/Node) and native mobile (iOS/Android) architectures.
Solid understanding of Spring, Docker, and Kubernetes.
Strong advocacy for automated testing, continuous delivery, and software quality across the software development lifecycle.
Deep experience with service-based architectures, Domain-Driven Design, and reactive/event-driven systems.
Demonstrated success modernizing highly coupled monolithic enterprise systems and implementing Federated GraphQL for client-backend decoupling.
Strong customer focus and relationship-building skills, with the ability to explain complex problems clearly to engineers and executives.
Willingness to dive into details and take an iterative approach to problems and solutions.
Commitment to psychological safety and the principles of Sooner Safer Happier.

Responsibilities

Define technical strategies based on outcome hypotheses and Better Value Sooner Safer Happier (BVSSH) metrics, prioritizing quality, business outcomes, time-to-learning, continuous compliance, and developer joy.
Lead the architectural evolution of core commerce systems and create and execute a roadmap for transforming coupled monolithic services into a modern distributed architecture while maintaining business continuity and improving maintainability and deployment safety.
Evolve domain boundaries using Domain-Driven Design and bounded contexts that reduce cognitive load and enable multidisciplinary teams to deliver independently.
Use Federated GraphQL and consumer-driven contracts to decouple web and native mobile teams from backend release cycles while supporting a flexible, performant data layer.
Improve flow efficiency by identifying and alleviating systemic impediments such as waits and handoffs, and enable fast, safe-to-fail experiments across JVM-based services.
Cultivate psychological safety, encourage experimentation, and promote a blameless culture in which engineers can learn from intelligent failure and challenge the status quo.
Write code, build foundational frameworks, and establish patterns that help engineering teams avoid anti-patterns during the transformation.
Mentor and train a broad engineering community on sophisticated technical issues.
Collaborate within agile, multifunctional project teams across product management, product development, quality, and user experience research and development.