Staff Software Engineer, Search Platform

eBay's Cassini is an AI search platform powering various applications, from search results to AI chatbots, serving billions of requests daily. The search platform team's mission is to enable product teams to create relevant, scalable, and magical AI-powered experiences. This Staff Software Engineer role involves understanding, designing, and developing sophisticated C++ software, optimizing cost and latency, and improving self-serve and monitoring capabilities within the platform. The role requires expertise in information retrieval, modern C++, and distributed systems.

Must Have

• Understand, estimate, design, and develop sophisticated software applications in C++
• Deliver highly performing, low latency, robust code with high test coverage, continuous integration, and production monitoring
• Participate in code and design reviews
• Optimize development cycles through CI/CD enhancements and AI-driven tools
• Triage and debug production issues
• Share knowledge with team members via documentation and mentoring
• Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science or a closely related field, accompanied by 5 years of proven experience, or equivalent experience
• Solid foundational knowledge and practical application experience in Information Retrieval
• Deep, demonstrable expertise using modern C++ standards (C++17/20 or later) for high-performance computing
• Expertise in building scalable, distributed systems
• Experience designing, instrumenting, and maintaining systems in a production environment (observability, alerting, monitoring, etc.)

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.

Cassini is eBay’s AI search platform that powers most of eBay’s applications, from the search results page, recommendations on view item pages, to Ads serving and AI chatbot. Those applications are configured by different teams inside eBay as Cassini query workflows that use the different state-of-the-art capabilities of our system: efficient sparse and dense retrieval, machine-learned ranking, real-time inference, configurable federation, and workflow execution with automatic dependency fetching.

We serve several billion requests per day and host multiple billion documents in our production system. The mission of the search platform team is to help the different eBay product teams to create relevant, scalable, and magical experiences that are powered by AI.

We do this by:

• Adding new functionality to the platform,
• Optimizing cost-to-serve and latency on a platform level or optimizing via consultation on the application level, and
• Improving self-serve and monitoring capabilities.

General platform optimizations are usually achieved by developing or using advanced data structures and algorithms, while application-level optimizations are mostly rooted in a deep understanding of designing information retrieval systems. The core components of Cassini are written in modern C++, and we use parallel and distributed computation to power query serving. If you have a background in those areas and like to contribute to achieving our mission, please come join us!

What you will accomplish:

• Understand, estimate, design, and develop sophisticated software applications in C++
• Deliver highly performing, low latency, robust code with high test coverage, continuous integration, and production monitoring
• Participate in code and design reviews
• Optimize development cycles through CI/CD enhancements and AI-driven tools
• Triage and debug production issues
• Share your knowledge with team members via documentation and mentoring

What you will bring:

• Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science or a closely related field, accompanied by 5 years of proven experience, or equivalent experience in place of the degree
• Solid foundational knowledge and practical application experience in the field of Information Retrieval
• Deep, demonstrable expertise using modern C++ standards (C++17/20 or later) for high-performance computing
• Expertise in building scalable, distributed systems
• Strong intellectual curiosity and a tenacious drive to own and and successfully solve ambiguous, difficult technical challenges
• Experience designing, instrumenting, and maintaining systems in a production environment (observability, alerting, monitoring, etc.)

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