Good, but could be much better. - Senior Staff Software Engineer eBay Employee Review

4.0
Jan 8, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great work life balance, the management are very understanding and there are lots of opportunities to move around the firm with its many and varied divisions. PayPal, Skype, Ebay, Stubhub etc. Pretty secure job, even though we went through a recent round of layoffs (great package given). Good perks and benefits. Good compensation.

Cons

I joined the company some 18 months ago, so as a relative newcomer, my experience so far has been that PayPal is one of those companies that may have been great at one point but as soon as the initial group of people left and eBay took over things are not the same. A lot of red-tape and compliance is expected in any financial firm, so nothing new there. The senior management even though pay a lot of lip-service to innovation and risk-taking is satisfied with doing the same old thing and playing the safe game. Being a 10 year company Software aging is a major issues for them currently. If you want a 9-5 stable job you might be on the right track, if you want to do some unique and innovative and make a difference to a lot of people in a relatively short time, keep looking.

Explore other reviews about eBay

5.0
Jul 14, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Really good company you will go out as a leader

Cons

Frequent org changes , layoffs

5.0
Jul 9, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Challenging work, great company culture. There is something genuinely motivating about building for a brand that everyone knows and uses: the scale and real-world stakes make the work feel meaningful. The AI work specifically is at the frontier of applied AI: production systems, hard problems in agentic workflows and evaluation, and real customer impact. Good work-life balance. Leadership is more engaged and technically credible than I expected from a company this size — when I built a prototype, senior stakeholders engaged substantively and supported continued investment quickly. Competitive compensation, sharp colleagues, and a well-sized Austin office with a focused, collaborative feel.

Cons

Like any tech company, there is some legacy code to deal with which can cause friction. That said, eBay has made meaningful progress on modernizing the tech stack and has genuinely embraced the latest tools: AI development here uses current frameworks and infrastructure, not decade-old patterns. Large company coordination processes (security reviews, cross-team alignment) can slow things that could move faster, and vendor partnerships add some communication overhead. But the reach of what you build makes it worth the extra overhead.

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