Senior Technical Lead – Traffic

About the role

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.

Job Type: Full-time

About the Team

At eBay, Traffic Engineering powers secure, scalable, and highly available traffic systems that support our global commerce platform. This role sits at the center of networking, platform engineering, performance optimization, and production reliability. The team is focused on building intelligent traffic management solutions, advancing PoP and caching strategies, improving observability and cyber resilience, and enabling eBay to innovate at internet scale.

Role Summary

We are looking for a Senior Technical Lead to lead the architecture, development, and evolution of eBay’s traffic engineering platform. This is an L26-level role for an experienced technical leader who can operate beyond a single component or team, drive design across multiple functional areas, influence technical direction, and improve engineering effectiveness across the organization. You will combine deep systems and networking expertise with strong execution, mentoring, and multi-functional leadership to deliver secure, scalable, and high-performance traffic solutions for eBay’s global platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the technical strategy, architecture, and delivery for traffic engineering systems spanning traffic management, load balancing, service connectivity, PoP optimization, and caching infrastructure.

• Design and build resilient, secure, and high-performance distributed systems using C/C++ and Go, along with modern cloud-native platform patterns.

• Own technical decisions across multiple functional areas, balancing scalability, reliability, performance, security, maintainability, and time-to-market tradeoffs.

• Drive platform evolution on Kubernetes, including networking integrations such as CNI, service mesh, IPAM, and production-grade deployment patterns.

• Establish and improve engineering metrics aligned to team and business goals, using observability and production insights to drive reliability, efficiency, and customer impact.

• Lead incident prevention and operational excellence through strong observability, cyber security controls, performance tuning, and robust system design.

• Partner with product, infrastructure, security, and adjacent engineering teams to align roadmaps, resolve cross-team dependencies, and drive technical consensus.

• Mentor engineers and technical leads through design reviews, code reviews, architecture guidance, and hands-on problem solving, setting the standard for engineering quality across the team.

• Act as a technical multiplier by improving platform capabilities, team productivity, development practices, and long-term architectural direction.

• Contribute to eBay’s innovation culture through open-source engagement, patents, and forward-looking technical exploration in networking and traffic systems.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with significant depth in networking, traffic engineering, distributed systems, or cyber security.

• Strong proficiency in C/C++ and Go, with experience building production-grade, high-performance systems.

• Deep expertise in low-level Linux networking, traffic management, and systems performance optimization.

• Strong experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure at scale.

• Proven experience designing scalable, secure, and observable distributed systems.

• Proven ability to lead sophisticated technical initiatives across teams and influence architecture beyond an immediate area.

• Strong mentoring, communication, and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to guide teams through ambiguity and technical tradeoffs.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with Envoy, service mesh, control plane and data plane architectures, SDN, eBPF, NGINX, HAProxy, network security, or comparable traffic load-balancing technologies.

• Experience in service mesh, Kubernetes CNI, and IPAM management.

• Experience building or operating products in the security domain.

• Strong background in caching strategies, PoP design, and internet-scale traffic optimization.

• Familiarity with Java or related backend ecosystems.

• Contributions to open-source projects, patents, or externally visible technical innovation.

• Experience working in large-scale, globally distributed engineering environments.

What Success Looks Like

In this role, you will be expected to operate as a senior technical leader who extends impact beyond day-to-day execution: shaping architecture across systems, driving measurable improvements in traffic platform outcomes, mentoring engineers, and influencing adjacent teams through strong technical judgment and collaboration.

Additional Details

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