Principal Member of Technical Staff - Distributed Databases

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.

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.

About the team and role

Our NuData team at eBay brings together exceptional engineers who are pushing the boundaries of distributed systems to build the next generation of database platforms powering eBay’s global marketplace. NuData builds and operates petabyte-scale, highly available distributed data platforms supporting some of eBay’s most critical workloads.

We are seeking a seasoned Principal Member of Technical Staff (Principal MTS) to serve as a senior technical leader for NuData in Bengaluru. This individual will provide technical vision, architectural direction, and hands-on engineering leadership for the local team while partnering closely with NuData architects, technical leads, and engineers in the U.S., China, and Ireland.

In this role, you will help define the technical vision and long-term architecture for NuData’s distributed database platforms and translate that vision into practical solutions. You will lead complex technical initiatives, drive key architectural decisions, and guide teams in solving challenging problems involving scalability, availability, performance, consistency, and operational efficiency.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will stay deeply engaged with the technology—designing and implementing critical components, writing and reviewing production code, prototyping new approaches, debugging complex system and production issues, and working alongside engineers to solve some of NuData’s hardest distributed-systems problems. You will also engage directly with NuData customers to understand their workloads, address critical technical challenges, and ensure our platforms continue to meet their evolving needs.

You will also play an important role in strengthening NuData’s engineering organization in Bengaluru by mentoring senior engineers and technical leads, raising the technical bar, establishing strong engineering and architectural practices, and developing the next generation of technical leaders.

What you will accomplish

• Provide technical leadership and direction for major NuData initiatives, helping shape the architecture and evolution of eBay’s next-generation distributed database platforms.

• Take end-to-end ownership of critical distributed database components and capabilities—from architecture and design through implementation, testing, production rollout, and ongoing operational excellence.

• Remain hands-on with design and development, implementing critical database components and production-quality code while tackling complex problems across storage, transactions, replication, consensus, geo-distribution, and high-concurrency systems.

• Lead architectural decisions for complex, ambiguous technical problems, balancing long-term platform strategy with pragmatic solutions that meet customer and business requirements.

• Drive improvements in scalability, latency, availability, reliability, and infrastructure efficiency across systems operating at eBay scale.

• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to engineers and technical leads, helping develop senior technical talent, improve engineering judgment, and build strong technical leadership within the Bengaluru organization.

• Establish and advocate for high standards in architecture, design, code quality, testing, observability, automation, and operational readiness. Lead design and code reviews for critical platform capabilities.

• Partner closely with engineers, architects, engineering leaders, product managers, and NuData customers to understand their workloads, requirements, and technical challenges, and translate those insights into platform capabilities and technical roadmaps.

• Lead projects from early exploration through production—including brainstorming, prototyping, benchmarking, architecture, implementation, deployment, and production support.

• Evaluate emerging technologies and open-source solutions and determine where they can meaningfully advance NuData’s architecture and capabilities. Leverage AI-assisted engineering tools where they improve engineering velocity and quality.

• Serve as a senior technical voice for NuData, communicating complex architectural decisions and tradeoffs clearly to both deeply technical audiences and engineering leadership.

What you will bring

• Masters degree in Computer Science or a related technical field with significant industry experience, or a PhD with equivalent experience building large-scale distributed systems.

• Significant hands-on experience architecting, building, and operating large-scale distributed databases, storage systems, or data infrastructure, with a demonstrated ability to lead technically complex initiatives.

Core Technical Expertise

• Deep expertise in distributed systems and database architecture, including distributed consensus, replication, consistency models, partitioning, fault tolerance, high availability, and geo-distributed systems.

• Strong understanding of database internals such as storage and buffer management, write-ahead logging (WAL), multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), lock management, query planning/execution, indexing, and database engines.

• Strong transaction-management expertise, including isolation levels, concurrency control, deadlock detection, crash recovery, physical/logical replication, and HA/failover strategies.

• Deep understanding of distributed-system failure modes, including network partitions, partial failures, consensus protocols such as RAFT/PAXOS, and the tradeoffs required to maintain availability, consistency, and performance at scale.

• Strong computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, concurrency, networking, operating systems, and software architecture.

• Expert-level programming experience in one or more languages such as C++, Java, Python, Scala, or equivalent languages, with a track record of developing and debugging complex production systems.

• Extensive hands-on experience with Object-Oriented Design, distributed programming, and large-scale relational and/or NoSQL database systems.

• Experience with modern infrastructure technologies and cloud-native environments, including technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker.

• Demonstrated ability to diagnose difficult production issues across software, storage, networking, and distributed-system boundaries and drive problems through root cause and long-term resolution.

Technical Leadership & Collaboration

• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction and influence architecture across multiple teams, including making and communicating difficult architectural tradeoffs.

• Proven ability to lead large, technically complex initiatives that span multiple components, teams, or organizations.

• Ability to operate at multiple levels—from defining long-term technical strategy and architecture to reviewing designs, writing code, debugging production systems, and helping engineers solve difficult implementation problems.

• Strong track record of mentoring and developing senior engineers and technical leads, raising engineering standards, and building a culture of technical excellence.

• Ability to produce clear, high-quality architecture and design documents and drive alignment around significant technical decisions.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence engineers, architects, engineering leaders, product teams, and other stakeholders without relying on organizational authority.

• Proven ability to navigate complex technical trade-offs and drive consensus across globally distributed teams with differing architectural opinions

• Demonstrated proficiency building production-grade software with AI coding agents, improving engineering velocity while maintaining high standards for quality, availability, and maintainability.

• Ability to decompose problems and provide agents with the right context, specifications, constraints, and validation criteria.

• Ability to capture and express business, architecture, codebase, and operational knowledge so AI coding agents can execute complex tasks accurately and autonomously.

• Hands-on experience delivering complex, production-quality software using AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex, etc.

Global Leadership

• Ability to thrive in a globally distributed engineering organization and build strong technical alignment across teams in Bengaluru, the U.S., China and Ireland.

• Ability to lead effectively across organizational and geographic boundaries, using both synchronous and as

Additional Details

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, veteran status, 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 for people with disabilities.

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