Sr Software Engineer - Digital Identity

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About the team and the role

The Customer Security team protects millions of eBay customers from digital identity crime, helping people buy and sell with confidence.

We are a product engineering team specialising in cybercrime, digital identity, and customer protection. Our mission is to understand how customer identities are compromised, turn intelligence and industry research into actionable insights, and build security capabilities that protect customers across eBay.

Our work spans consumer identity and authentication security, cybercrime intelligence, device trust, identity compromise detection, and emerging technologies such as AI agents. We combine industry and product research, adversarial thinking, software engineering, and large-scale data systems to deliver measurable customer protection. We partner closely with Identity Engineering, Authentication, Fraud, Trust, and Risk teams to make these capabilities available throughout the customer journey.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer with strong engineering fundamentals, substantial consumer identity or related security expertise, and the technical leadership to help shape the future of Customer Intelligence.

This role goes beyond researching threats or implementing predefined solutions. You will assess how consumer identity security is evolving across the industry, evaluate products and approaches adopted by other major consumer platforms, and develop evidence-backed views on what eBay should build, improve, or adopt. You will turn those recommendations into technical direction, engineering priorities, and production capabilities.

You will provide hands-on technical leadership across complex initiatives, from identifying a problem and evaluating options through architecture, experimentation, delivery, and adoption. You will challenge assumptions constructively, influence decisions across partner teams, and help other engineers deliver effective solutions at consumer-platform scale.

What you will accomplish:

• Research the industry and shape our direction. Investigate developments in consumer identity, authentication, account protection, digital trust, and AI agent security. Assess competing products, industry practices, emerging technologies, and attacker techniques; identify capability gaps and recommend where Customer Intelligence should invest.
• Lead the Customer Intelligence capability technically. Establish credible technical direction, guide engineering priorities and architectural decisions, and lead complex, multi-quarter initiatives. Mentor engineers, resolve technical trade-offs, and coordinate delivery across teams without relying on formal management authority.
• Turn research into products. Move from an emerging problem or observed attack technique to a defined customer risk, evaluated options, a proposed product capability, and a production implementation. Use prototypes and measurable evidence to decide what to build, what to integrate, and what not to pursue.
• Build impactful security capabilities. Design, develop, and operate scalable intelligence platforms, APIs, services, and trust signals that help identify compromised identities, establish device and identity confidence, prevent account takeover, and enable secure customer and agent experiences. Own technical delivery through production adoption.
• Become a trusted technical authority. Bring informed opinions grounded in relevant identity expertise, industry and competitive research, and practical engineering experience. Challenge established approaches, make clear recommendations, and influence product and technical decisions while remaining open to new evidence.
• Deliver measurable customer outcomes. Set success criteria for security capabilities, assess their effectiveness using customer and operational data, and balance risk reduction with false positives, customer friction, performance, reliability, and cost. Drive adoption across authentication, account recovery, and other high-risk customer journeys.
• Elevate engineering excellence. Contribute hands-on to system design, prototyping, code, and technical reviews. Mentor colleagues, share research and engineering knowledge, and improve how the team evaluates opportunities and delivers production systems.

What you will bring:

• Consumer identity and security expertise. Meaningful experience with consumer identity, authentication, account security, identity risk, or a closely related trust or fraud domain. You understand the challenges of protecting customer identities and making security decisions at large consumer-platform scale.
• Industry and product research capability. Demonstrated ability to research industry developments, assess competing products and technical approaches, form independent, evidence-backed opinions, and translate findings into product recommendations or engineering investments. You can distinguish meaningful developments from technology hype.
• Technical leadership and ownership. Experience setting technical direction and leading complex initiatives from ambiguous problems through design, implementation, production deployment, and adoption. You influence engineering and product decisions, guide other engineers, and work effectively across organisational boundaries.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals. Experience designing, building, and operating reliable production systems, with proficiency in at least one modern programming language. We value engineering judgment, adaptability, and practical experience over expertise in any particular technology stack.
• Experience building scalable systems. Practical knowledge of APIs, distributed services, cloud platforms, data engineering, or event-driven architectures, including the security, reliability, performance, and maintainability trade-offs involved.
• Research-to-production judgment. Ability to investigate evolving attacks and emerging security challenges, define the customer problem, evaluate build-versus-integrate options, validate solutions through experimentation, and deliver capabilities with measurable customer impact.
• Influence and collaboration. Ability to communicate technical recommendations and business trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders, build support across teams, handle constructive disagreement, and improve other engineers' effectiveness through mentoring and technical guidance.

Experience with cybercrime intelligence, device intelligence, fraud and abuse prevention, or AI and agent security is valuable. We expect depth in at least one relevant area and curiosity across adjacent domains, not expertise in every technology.

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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