Engineering Tech Lead – Backend

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We are looking for an experienced Engineering Tech Lead to help drive backend engineering within the Selling Experience organization. This is a technical and people leadership role for someone who can shape architecture, guide execution, mentor engineers, build team capability, and influence technical direction across the organization. This is a unique opportunity for someone who is technically hands-on and can lead a small, focused team to maximize impact.

This role is ideal for a strong backend leader who can bring clarity to complex technical problems, raise the engineering bar, and help engineers grow through coaching, mentorship, and hands-on technical guidance. The person in this role should be comfortable leading from the front: aligning the team around priorities, improving engineering practices, creating a high-ownership culture, and helping the team deliver scalable, reliable, and high-quality systems that power seller-facing experiences.

The Engineering Tech Lead is expected to remain close to implementation through design reviews, code reviews, debugging, prototyping, and targeted hands-on contributions when needed. You will partner closely with engineering managers, product managers, architects, and partner teams to translate business and product needs into clear technical direction and executable engineering plans.

• Provide technical and people leadership for backend platform and service development, including architecture, design, execution planning, and engineering best practices.

• Mentor and coach engineers through design reviews, code reviews, technical discussions, feedback, career guidance, and day-to-day support.

• Help build team capability by improving design discipline, strengthening engineering practices, encouraging knowledge sharing, and creating opportunities for ownership.

• Translate ambiguous requirements into clear technical strategies, milestones, trade-offs, and actionable deliverables.

• Partner with engineering managers, product managers, architects, and partner teams to align technical direction with business priorities and execution needs.

• Identify technical risks, people/process gaps, dependencies, and execution challenges early, and help the team make balanced decisions.

• Support Agile execution through backlog refinement, estimation, sprint planning, iterative delivery, and continuous improvement.

• Stay close to implementation through prototyping, debugging, code reviews, and critical-path hands-on development when needed.

• AI‑first: Adopt an AI-first mindset, treating agentic AI as a core design and operating lever to multiply engineering productivity, reliability, and customer impact, while establishing clear safety and ethical guardrails.

• Generative leadership: Practice generative leadership by prioritizing outcomes over outputs, optimizing flow to reduce lead times and WIP, fostering psychological safety for experimentation, and championing servant leadership to drive continuous improvement.

• Foster a strong engineering culture centered on ownership, technical excellence, accountability, collaboration, psychological safety, and pragmatic delivery.

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent technical degree.

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in backend systems.

• Strong technical and people leadership experience in backend platform or service engineering.

• Strong hands-on coding background in Java/Kotlin, Node.js, or similar backend technologies.

• Strong understanding of OOP, SOLID principles, multithreaded systems, distributed systems, scalability, consistency, durability, availability, and REST/service-oriented architectures.

• Proven ability to lead technical execution, team alignment, and engineering quality without relying on direct people-management authority.

• Experience mentoring engineers, building team capability, and raising the technical bar across a team.

• Strong planning, prioritization, estimation, and execution skills, including breaking down complex initiatives into manageable technical tasks.

• Experience working in Agile environments such as Scrum or Kanban, with tools like Jira or equivalent.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to proactively identify technical risks, people/process gaps, dependencies, and execution challenges.

• Experience with cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes, Docker, and containerized deployments.

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, operational tooling, and distributed system observability, including logging, tracing, metrics, and alerting.

• Experience working on large-scale backend platforms or customer-facing systems.

• Experience using AI tools to improve engineering productivity, software quality, testing, operations, or developer experience.

• Experience leading cross-team initiatives or influencing engineering direction across multiple teams.

Additional Details

This job posting relates to an existing vacancy within eBay.

eBay is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability, or other legally protected status. If you have a need that requires accommodation, please contact us at [email protected]. We will make every effort to respond to your request for accommodation as soon as possible. View our accessibility statement to learn more about eBay's commitment to ensuring digital accessibility.

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