Tech Blog Archive

Solving technical challenges at scale to power the world’s largest Internet marketplace.

Accessibility

Introducing an Accessibility Linter for Marko: Shortening the Accessibility Testing Pipeline

Our goal: Help developers create better code, more efficiently, while maintaining accessibility for all.

By: Luke LaValva
Big Data

How We Export Billion-Scale Graphs on Transactional Graph Databases

By leveraging Apache Spark, eBay Graph Database can export a graph with billions of vertices and edges.

By: Hongjiang Zhang, Jun Li, Hieu Nguyen and Flora Zhang
Machine Learning

Evolving Recommendations: A Personalized User-Based Ranking Model

We developed a ranking model to generate personalized recommendations that optimally ranks hundreds of candidate recommendations by considering a user’s shopping experience as well as platform performance objectives.

By: Yingji Pan, Bing Zhou and Yuri M. Brovman
Recommender Systems

Beyond Words: How Multimodal Embeddings Elevate eBay's Product Recommendations

By integrating information from different modalities of eBay listings such as titles and images, we greatly improved the buyer experience and relevance of the recommended items on eBay’s listing pages.

By: Shibo Song, Lili Weng and Shawn Zhou
User Experience

eBay Execs Talk Generative AI and Computer Vision at VentureBeat Transform Conference

Chief AI Officer Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov and Vice President of Seller Experience Xiaodi Zhang shared how AI will make life easier for sellers, buyers and employees.

By: Dan Nosowitz
Machine Learning

eBay Chief Technology Officer Mazen Rawashdeh Talks AI, Embracing Tech Disruption on Bloomberg Podcast

Mazen shared his perspective on emerging technology trends and how eBay is embracing the disruption, bringing new customer experiences powered by AI to the marketplace.

By: Dan Nosowitz
Developer Tools

eBay’s Common Automation Solution for Platform Evolution

Here at eBay, we’ve crafted a brand new approach to automate platform evolution for all applications — one that provides a repeatable and reusable infrastructure to streamline evolution.

By: Paul Zhang and Tao Jin

eBay Is Hiring

145 Job Openings Start Your Search

North
America

96 Job Openings

Europe &
Middle East

29 Job Openings

Asia
Pacific

20 Job Openings
Machine Learning

eBay’s Blazingly Fast Billion-Scale Vector Similarity Engine

The Similarity Engine's use cases include item-to-item similarity for text and image modality and user-to-item personalized recommendations based on a user’s historical behavior data.

By: Santosh Shahane, Kui Yang, Leonard Dahlmann, Amarendra Belineni, Yan Sun, Shrivatsan Navalpakkam Rajagopalan and Pavel Petrushkov
Developer Productivity

How eBay Modernized the Most Important Page on Our Platform

eBay's core page — the View Item page — gets 250 million views per day. Here's how we took on the task of modernizing it.

By: Lakshimi Duraivenkatesh, Ben Vesco and Saral Sukumar Jeyaseelan
Machine Learning

How eBay's New Search Feature Was Inspired By Window Shopping

A new feature generates customer delight by using modern computer vision techniques to drive new search paradigms through visual discovery.

By: Senthilkumar Gopal, Shubhangi Tandon, Christopher Miller, Deepika Srinivasan, Rui Kong, Selcuk Kopru and Srinivas Bhagavathula
Developer Productivity

Open-Source Contribution: New Maven Dependency Resolution Algorithm

It’s been effective at speeding up productivity, pushed to eBay, and contributed back to the open source community.

By: Eric Cai, Simon Wang and Caddie Song
Data Infrastructure and Services

Variable Hub: Easier Data Integration for Risk Decisioning

A new risk data hub for decisioning can significantly boost variable time-to-market, with high performance under billions of query traffic.

By: Kan Lin, Jiwen Yan and Yuanyuan Tan
Microservices

API Evolution Is a Challenge. Could Contract Testing Be the Solution?

Contract testing has grown in popularity in recent years with the widespread adoption of microservice architectures. In this article, we will share our experiences with contract testing at eBay.

By: Xiaoye Wang, Simon Wang, Daphne Huang, David Van Couvering and Qingyuan Liu
Advertising

How eBay Created a Language Model With Three Billion Item Titles

By leveraging deep learning techniques to compare the titles of product listings, we greatly improved the relevance of our recommended items on eBay’s View Item page.

By: Chen Xue, Jesse Lute, Dan Schonfeld, Guoping Han and Leonard Dahlmann
Testing

How eBay’s Notification Platform Used Fault Injection in New Ways

eBay’s notification platform team built a fault-tolerant, resilient system by injecting faults in the application level.

By: Wei Chen
Kubernetes

Why and How eBay Pivoted to OpenTelemetry

eBay makes a crucial pivot to OpenTelemetry to better align with industry standards for Observability.

By: Vijay Samuel
Testing

Increase A/B Testing Power by Combining Experiments

How the powerful meta-analysis method called "weighted z-test" can help eBay become more efficient.

By: Zezhong Zhang
Advertising

New Buyer Groups Tool Brings Personalized Marketing to eBay Sellers

Sellers in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Australia, France, Italy and Spain now have access to Buyer Groups, a new tool which allows them to segment their buyers to drive more repeat business.

By: Parin Jogani and David Bernstein
Advertising

Multi-Objective Ranking for Promoted Auction Items

Determining which promoted auction items to display in a merchandising placement is a multi-sided customer challenge that presents opportunities to both surface amazing auction inventory to buyers and help sellers boost visibility on their auction listings.

By: Ishaan Arora, Chen Xue, Jesse Lute and Dan Schonfeld
Machine Learning

Sherlock.io: An Upgraded Machine Learning Monitoring System

Billions of queries require new, smarter alerting features.

By: Huai Jiang
Microservices

eBay's Notification Streaming Platform: How eBay Handles Real-Time Push Notifications at Scale

A case study demonstrates how eBay's Notification Engineering team optimizes a streaming system in a microservice architecture to support high-throughput broadcast notifications.

By: Xiaoye Wang
Advertising

Multi-Relevance Ranking Model for Similar Item Recommendation

Buyers reveal a whole range of behaviors and interests when they browse our pages, so we decided to incorporate these additional purchase intent signals into our machine learning model to improve the relevance of our recommended items.

By: Chen Xue, Rachel Vishnepolsky and Zhen Ge
Developer Tools

OpenFeature, With Contributions From eBay, Submitted to CNCF's Sandbox Program

The new open feature flagging standard enables companies to deliver cloud-native applications more effectively.

By: Justin Abrahms, Principal Architect, Chair of eBay's Open Source Program
Competitions

eBay’s 3rd University Machine Learning Competition: Predicting Shipping Delivery Dates

For our annual ML competition, we challenged university students to predict how many days a carrier takes to deliver packages.

By: Uwe Mayer, Senior Applied Researcher
Advertising

Improving Shopping Recommendations for Customers Through eBay’s Relevance Cascade Model

Under the new machine learning model, buyers are recommended items that are more aligned to their shopping interests on eBay.

By: Chen Xue, Applied Researcher
Deep Learning

Building a Deep Learning Based Retrieval System for Personalized Recommendations

A step-by-step guide on how to build a state-of-the-art recommender system in an industrial setting.

By: Yuri M. Brovman
Developer Tools

How eBay Developed an Automatic Testing Solution for Batch Application Upgrades

A look at how our eBay technologists created an automatic testing solution for batch applications.

By: Paul Zhang and Tao Jin
Developer Productivity

Creating High-Quality Staging Data with a NoSQL Data Migration System

At eBay, we’ve focused on improving our staging environment to increase our software delivery speed, which ultimately allows us to launch features faster to our customers. Over the last several months, we’ve raised the quality of our staging data by establishing a dedicated and scalable data migration system.

By: Ramesh Periyathambi
Developer Tools

A Lightweight Distributed Architecture to Handle Thousands of Library Releases at eBay

A new lightweight distributed architecture is proposed and applied on eBay’s release system to support thousands of libraries release work in high efficiency.

By: Tao Jin and Paul Zhang