Building with Node.JS at eBay

This is a repost from an interview I did with TalentBuddy a while back, which unfortunately is no longer posted on the internet. It’s a pretty good look at how eBay uses Node.JS, so check it out!

Can you please tell us a little bit about what you do now and the path you took to get here?

I’d love to! I’m currently the lead engineer of the Homepage Team at eBay. We work on the applications and services that power whatever you see when you land on ebay.com, as well as a few internal tools and services that are used around the site and apps. Overall, our services handle around a billion requests daily as well as serving the eBay homepage for many millions of users worldwide.

I came to this team sort of fortuitously. I was doing radar engineering for a government contractor and some freelance software work on the side, and decided to make the change and do software full time. I applied through the Hunch site (which was acquired by eBay in 2012), unaware that the Hunch team in New York was now working on recommendations and the updated homepage. I made it through the interviews and was working as a full stack developer for a year before I moved into the lead role after the previous lead left.

If you were to sum up the evolution of the New York tech scene up to now and where things are going in a short story what would it be?

I don’t think I’ve been involved in the NYC tech scene long enough to give a good account of the evolution, but I’ll relate a story I heard…