Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

eBay; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A global e-commerce leader is seeking a skilled backend engineer in London to architect solutions and support applications in production. You will lead and mentor your team while consistently delivering complex projects. The ideal candidate has experience in Java, Spring Boot, and large-scale distributed systems. This role offers hybrid working, competitive salary, and comprehensive benefits, including generous leave policies and health insurance.

Benefits

25 days paid time off

Sabbatical for 4 weeks after five years

Private health insurance

Employee stock purchase plan

Employer contributed pension up to 9%

Qualifications

• Experience in software development, design, and architecture.
• Experience with large scale distributed systems in production.
• Commercial experience with various testing methodologies.

Responsibilities

• Deliver against product and engineering backlogs.
• Architect secure, maintainable, and extensible solutions.
• Support applications in production, including monitoring and alerting.
• Lead and mentor the team on engineering best practices.
• Contribute to feature definitions for services.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

Developing and using enterprise APIs

SQL and NoSQL databases

Async processing

Cloud native applications

Continuous Delivery environment

Modern observability practices

Tools

Grafana

Prometheus

Kotlin

Job description

About the role

Every day, millions of users sell and ship their wares using eBay. Our team supports this diverse community by building shipping products around the globe, helping individual sellers and small businesses to meet the growing expectations of online buyers. We are a product-oriented team who move fast and stay curious. Join us to make an impact on one of the world’s largest e-commerce websites.

The team is a backend team building internal and external APIs, enterprise distributed systems, services. Our teams operate a DevOps philosophy. You, together with the rest of your team, support in production what you build. We value delivery to production, getting data / feedback from production and using this data to drive further improvements and features. We release continuously to production, multiple times a day.

Responsibilities

• Consistently delivering against the product and engineering backlogs.
• Architecting solutions that are secure, maintainable, extensible and can meet the demands of eBay’s scale, documenting in code along the way
• Supporting our applications in production, including setting up & maintaining logging, monitoring and alerting, being on-call, leading retrospectives
• Lead and mentor team on best engineering and architectural patterns and practices
• Pair programming, reviewing pull requests and giving constructive feedback
• Contributing to the definition of features for services owned by your team
• Continuously improving yourself, your team, the product by building AI agents, suggesting and helping implement new Engineering tools, processes, best practices, which also increase our velocity and improve testing and observability
• Effectively communicating your and your team’s progress to your team members, your manager and wider eBay colleagues
• Leads identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for an entire application or features
• Partners with EM, PM - collaborates to gather and understand requirements and expectations and provides estimations, options to mitigate risks
• Leading on large initiatives spanning multiple teams in the domain

Requirements

• To be considered for this role, you must have experience in software development, experience with software design and architecture, running large scale distributed systems in production environments.
• You must have significant commercial experience and a passion for working in :
• Java
• Spring Boot
• Developing and using enterprise APIs
• Various testing methodologies
• System design at high scale
• and commercial experience with :
• SQL and NoSQL databases
• Async processing
• Cloud native applications
• Working in a Continuous Delivery environment
• Modern observability practices

Nice to have

• Not vital, but you’ll have the edge if you also have experience with :
• Grafana
• Prometheus
• Kotlin or a least the willingness to learn it
• Batch processing data pipelines
• or have worked in :
• an eCommerce organisation
• a shipping / logistics / exports organisation

What you bring

• Agile: Test-Driven Development, collaboration and continuous delivery are your preferred engineering practices. We take the best bits of Lean, Scrum and Kanban too.
• Architecture: In a large scale distributed web-application, you choose the right tool for the job at hand. You know when to break something out into a new component and the best way to wire it in, when to go with the simplest fit into the current system and when to rethink the existing approach.
• Experience: You are an experienced engineer, with several years working at a high level, confident working on a range of languages and frameworks and are happy to pick up new ones. You like working on established technology stacks as well as quickly changing platforms.
• Leadership: You have proven experience on delivering complex initiatives at scale by leading multiple teams from technical and process points of view. You have influenced the technical direction of a team and have mentoring experience.
• Maturity: You understand the necessity of the engineering vs business balance and are able to compromise efficiently. You are not afraid of legacy systems and know how to deal with them and when. You plan just right according to a situation and not too much or too little. Sensible approach when it comes to late changes or deadlines.

What we bring

Rewarding technical challenges - fixing eCommerce delivery requires solving difficult technical problems: building unified shipping platforms for diverse customers, iterating fast while providing the best customer experience, constantly improving our technology while dealing with the eBay volume is what we do best.

Wonderful, bright, air-conditioned offices in Shoreditch, with bike racks (and shower!), right next to Liverpool St and Shoreditch High Street stations for super easy commuting, and lots of great food options nearby. When we’re in the office, a light breakfast and lunch is provided, and a weekly massage.

Great company culture - we have a culture of respect and high expectations of others. We love sharing a drink during our Friday All Hands, play board games and enjoy free lunch on our demo day.

Hybrid working - really great support when working from home (we’ve got good video conferencing facilities).

Competitive salary and generous benefits.

Benefits

Benefits are an essential part of your total compensation for the work you do every day. Whether you’re single, in a growing family, or nearing retirement, eBay offers a variety of comprehensive and competitive benefit programs to meet your needs.

In addition to a competitive salary, eBay UK benefits include :

• 25 days paid time off - increasing to 27 after two years, and an additional day each year up to a maximum of 30
• Sabbatical for 4 weeks after five years
• 20 weeks paid leave for birth parents, 12 weeks leave for non-birth parents (fathers, adoptive parents, surrogacy)
• Private health insurance, dental and eye care
• Life and disability insurance
• Employee stock purchase plan (15% discount) and Restricted Stock Unit (RSUs) grant
• Employer contributed pension up to 9%

Read more about our benefits at

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