Sr. Leader, Engineering Excellence

eBay•San Jose, CA

About The Position

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. We are the Core Buyer and Community Engineering Org that strives to delight the diverse eBay customer base across the world. Our organization owns all parts of the buyer journey at eBay such as eBayLive, ViewItem/Transaction, Home Page, Discovery, Payments, Protection, Value Added Service, Community, etc. We are a data driven agile organization. We ship often with high quality, get immediate user feedback and use experimentation to make decisions. We constantly push for engineering excellence and the best engineering culture. We are seeking a Senior Member of Technical Staff Engineer to own and elevate developer experience, engineering excellence, and tech velocity across our organization. This role blends deep technical leadership (architecture, systems reliability, tooling) with program leadership (cross-org governance, metrics, and coaching). You will lead a group of talented TPMs and engineers, work closely with domain leaders to drive standards, platforms, and practices that reduce developer friction, improve reliability, and accelerate time-to-value while partnering closely with Platform/Infra/SRE teams.

Requirements

10+ years in software engineering with 3+ years in senior staff/principal roles; prior management or tech lead experience.
Expertise in CI/CD, testing strategies, observability (logs, metrics, traces), incident management, and resilience patterns.
Strong data-driven mindset; proficiency with engineering analytics and workflow tools (e.g., Jira, Jellyfish, DORA metrics).
Proven track record driving cross-functional programs and elevating developer experience at scale.
Excellent communication and facilitation skills; adept at blameless culture and standards adoption.

Responsibilities

Developer Ergonomics Define and lead a developer experience strategy: tooling, local dev flows, build/test pipelines, dev environments, and documentation. Identify friction via data, shadowing, and surveys; prioritize and deliver cross-org level improvements. Establish golden paths and paved road standards; maintain self-serve portals and onboarding kits.
Essential Engineering (EE) Run governance: intake, prioritization, reporting, and quarterly reviews tied to OKRs; mentor the TPM supporting EE.
Tech Velocity Drive company defined/mandated velocity and quality KPIs (lead time, deployment frequency, change fail rate, MTTR, bug leakage, say/do ratio). Working with domain teams to optimize CI/CD, test strategy, and release management.
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Institutionalize blameless postmortems with standard templates, severity taxonomy, and action-item tracking. Build a shared knowledge base of incidents, patterns, and fixes; drive cross-team learnings into standards and tooling. Ensure corrective and preventive actions (CAPA) are prioritized and completed; report closure rates and recurrence reduction.
Definition of Done (DoD), Logging, and Alerting Codify DoD for all services/components: tests, docs, security checks, logging, metrics, tracing, alerts, runbooks, and rollback plans.
Resiliency and High Availability Define HA and resiliency standards (SLO/SLA targets, error budgets, capacity, retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, backpressure). Work with each domain to drive resilience engineering: chaos tests, disaster recovery drills, multi-zone/region strategies, and dependency risk management.
Jellyfish & Jira Hygiene Own hygiene standards for planning tools: issue states, story sizing, epics, labels, and linkage to OKRs and deployments. Automate integrity checks and dashboards; coach teams to maintain consistent workflows and data quality.
Developer Experience (Dx) Survey to Action Run periodic Dx surveys; analyze results and convert findings into a prioritized roadmap with owners and timelines. Publish progress transparently; measure impact with before/after metrics and developer feedback.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Partnership Co-own operational excellence goals with SRE: best-in-class Time to Detect (TTD) and Time to Restore (TTR), and SLA/SLO adherence. Align on alerting thresholds, on-call practices, runbooks, escalation paths, and readiness checklists for launches.
Leadership and influence Operate as a cross-org technical leader: set standards, secure buy-in, and hold teams accountable through influence. Act as the technical bridge between Domain and Platform/Infra/SRE teams to fulfill each others’ needs and demands. Mentor engineers and managers; build capability in reliability, observability, and delivery excellence. Communicate clearly to executives and partners: narratives, dashboards, and decision briefs that tie work to business outcomes.