Director Software Engineering

The organisation

eBay Classifieds Group is a global collection of local brands. With ten brands that span the globe, they help people find whatever they are looking for in their local communities – whether it’s a coat, a couch, a car, or a career. Every connection made or item found makes a difference, by creating a world where people share more and waste less.

The global eBay Classifieds Group headquarters is based in Amsterdam and are home to the brands Marktplaats and 2ehands.be as well as the global centers of excellence for Technology, Advertising, and Motors. The team consists of open-minded doers who believe in challenging themselves to excel. The culture is best described as fun, fast-paced, inclusive, and full of opportunities. The BHAG that unites the team is to create connected commerce and to enable economic opportunities for everyone.

In terms of technology, key elements are reliability, safety (preventing fraud), customer experience, and scalability. This requires a strong vision and leadership. That’s why they are currently hiring a forward-thinking Director Software Engineering, who will inspire the engineering teams to think big and develop for scale.

“Classifieds are fun. Just ask the millions of people who use our brands every day to buy, sell, trade, connect, and share. Quite frankly, there is nothing I’d rather do than contributing to the technological advancement to empower them.” – Peter Maas, Senior Director Global Technology

The position

Harnessing the power of technology to elevate and drive social purpose – that’s what a career at eBay Classifieds Group is all about. It’s one of the few employers which manages to combine a start-up mindset with the scale of a global powerhouse. This innovative leader in online classifieds is currently hiring a forward-thinking Director Software Engineering, who will inspire the engineering teams to think big and develop for scale.

Tasks & responsibilities

The Director Software Engineering will be responsible for the sustainability and scalability of the technological products eBay Classifieds Group is building. This role will have an important impact on the development of the long term technology strategy to ensure the best balance between impact and investment. To execute core parts of this strategy, the Director Software Engineering will lead and develop teams of engineers, architects and scientists, inspiring them to build high quality, globally scalable services.

“In the last years, we successfully transitioned core pieces of our architecture to globally used, multi-tenant capabilities. Given the scale of our operation, many of our teams have tackled or are working on complex engineering challenges to deal with exponential growth in domains where we easily handle hundreds of millions of requests and events and terabytes of data, coming from the markets every day.” – Peter Maas, Senior Director Global Technology

On a day-to-day basis, the Director Software Engineering will be responsible for the management of the R&D and delivery of a wide range of centralized data services and technology products. The Director Software Engineering will appoint a management team to help lead the department, which consists of around 80 specialists.

The department can be divided into three subdivisions, focused on:

• Data – several teams specialized in topics such as data science, recommendation engines and personalization tooling;
• Trust & Communication – a number of teams dedicated to topics such as authentication, chat systems, push notifications, and AI to fight fraud;
• Advertising Tech – several teams developing tools and advertising solutions to help professional sellers improve the performance of their ads.

As part of the central product and technology team, the Director Software Engineering will work directly with product and technology leaders in the Amsterdam headquarters as well as international counterparts. They will also partners with business representatives and various functional leaders. All in all, the new Director Software Engineering will be surrounded by passionate and knowledgeable colleagues, both centrally and locally, who are keen to embrace complex projects and excited about pioneering the frontiers of technology to keep connecting millions of buyers and sellers around the world, today and in the future.

Candidate profile

• MSc or MBA with a tech background
• Minimum of 12 years’ experience with online project/program management
• Experience working in global organization, with remote partners
• Business acumen
• Team leadership and development
• Well-versed in terms of tech and product
• Scale-up mindset

Interested?

You can apply to this position by using the link below. eBay Classifieds Group works with Top of Minds to fill this vacancy. Contact Hayke Tjemmes for more information.