Software Engineer

Overview

Backend Software Engineer role in eBay's Backend Engineering team, combining backend software development with Site Reliability Engineering, observability, production troubleshooting, and incident management.

What you'll do

• Design, develop, test, and maintain scalable backend services, RESTful APIs, and microservices using Java, Go, or Python.
• Build highly available, fault-tolerant, and resilient backend applications, focusing on performance optimization, scalability, and operational efficiency.
• Implement and enhance application monitoring, logging, distributed tracing, and alerting using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, and OpenTelemetry.
• Investigate and resolve complex production issues, perform root cause analysis (RCA), and implement sustainable engineering solutions to prevent recurring incidents.
• Develop and optimize distributed systems, microservices, and cloud-native applications to ensure reliability and seamless service performance.
• Build automation tools, improve deployment processes, and reduce operational overhead through engineering-driven solutions.
• Participate in incident response, production debugging, reliability reviews, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Partner with Engineering, Architecture, SRE, and Operations teams to improve application design, system availability, observability, and overall platform reliability.

What you'll need

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, primarily in backend development, distributed systems, or platform engineering.
• Strong programming expertise in Java, Go, or Python, with hands-on experience developing production-grade backend applications.
• Experience designing and developing REST APIs, microservices, and scalable distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, system design, and software engineering best practices.
• Hands-on experience with Spring Boot or equivalent backend development frameworks.
• Experience with cloud platforms, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and modern deployment practices.
• Practical knowledge of SRE principles, application reliability, observability, and production incident management.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Splunk, or OpenTelemetry.
• Strong debugging, troubleshooting, and root cause analysis (RCA) skills for complex production systems.
• Familiarity with application performance monitoring, logging, distributed tracing, alerting, and incident response.
• Understanding of databases, caching, messaging systems, and performance optimization in distributed environments.
• Strong problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering teams.

Nice to have

• Experience building internal developer tools, reliability automation, or operational platforms.
• Knowledge of SRE practices such as SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, and capacity planning.
• Experience with Kafka, Redis, or other distributed messaging and caching technologies.
• Exposure to infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform.
• Experience supporting large-scale, high-traffic production environments.