eBay

Large Enterprises

Most of these eBay write-ups come from Software Engineers (47), then Product Managers (4) and Backend Engineers (1). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (32), the system design round (9), the behavioral / leadership round (4) and the product sense round (4).

53 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

eBay·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

eBay Software Engineer coding round, one algorithmic problem about wildcard pattern matching against a dictionary. Pretty focused session, no fluff, just the problem and complexity analysis at the end.

Given a dictionary of words and a pattern string containing lowercase letters, '?' (matches exactly one character), and '.' (matches one or more characters), return all words from the dictionary that fully match the pattern. Also explain your approach to handling the variable-length '.' token and report your overall time complexity.

“The '?' part was fine, that's basically just length-checking a slot.”

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eBay·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jul 2026

Short eBay product round, basically just one question about improving the platform. Not much else to go on.

How would you improve eBay?

“Classic open-ended product question.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Coding round for a full-stack role at eBay. The recruiter said any language was fine but the interviewer locked it down to JS/TS on the spot, which threw me off since I'm way more comfortable in Python.

Implement a function that assigns ads to browser positions for a user. Inputs are a list of position strings, a list of candidate ads, and a per-user state dictionary tracking how many times each ad has been shown. The function should randomly assign ads to positions without duplicates (when supply allows), respect per-ad display limits, return the assignment, and update the state dictionary.

“The logic itself wasn't too bad to reason through.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

System design round at eBay focused entirely on cache and database consistency. The question had a lot of moving parts and I don't think I covered all of them as well as I should have.

You have a cache like Redis sitting in front of a relational database, and multiple app servers can update the same key at the same time. How do you design the system to prevent and resolve conflicts and race conditions? Cover write ordering, atomicity, versioning or compare-and-set, distributed locks, TTL and invalidation versus write-through or write-back, idempotent updates, and recovery from partial failures. Also talk through the API design, data model, consistency guarantees, and trade-offs.

“This one sprawled in a way I wasn't ready for.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

eBay coding round, pretty standard algorithmic stuff. They gave me a top-K frequency problem and wanted me to walk through the heap-based approach and talk complexity. Nothing too wild but the follow-up on bucket sort tripped me up a bit.

Given an array and an integer k, return the k most frequent elements. Walk through your approach and analyze the time complexity.

“I went straight to the frequency map and then a min-heap of size k, which is the expected path.”

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eBay·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026

eBay PM interview focused heavily on marketplace dynamics, backlog prioritization, and how you'd run experiments without blowing up seller or buyer trust. Pretty structured but they pushed hard on the judgment calls behind the framework scores.

How would you define the product objective and identify target users for a marketplace initiative at eBay?
Walk me through how you would prioritize a product backlog for a marketplace team, given inputs from funnel data, support tickets, and competing stakeholder requests.
What if the highest-scored backlog item is strategically unimportant to the business right now? How do you handle that?
How would you manage execution from idea to launch, coordinating across design, engineering, analytics, and stakeholders?
What instrumentation needs to be in place before you launch a new feature?
How would you design an A/B test for a marketplace feature when network effects between buyers and sellers might contaminate the control group?
If listing completion rates improve after a feature launch but listing quality drops, what do you do?
How would you communicate a difficult product tradeoff to executives when the data doesn't give you a clean answer?

“I went straight to first-time sellers because the funnel drop-off there felt obvious, but they pushed back asking about buyer trust implications.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

eBay software engineer interview with a coding round focused on designing an in-memory file system from scratch. Pretty straightforward concept but the follow-up discussion on data structures made it more interesting than I expected.

Design an in-memory file system where each file has a name and size. Implement addFile, getFileSize, deleteFile, and listFiles operations. listFiles should return entries formatted as 'name(size)', sorted by size descending with ties broken alphabetically.

“The CRUD operations were easy enough with a hash map, O(1) for everything.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

eBay software engineer interview with a coding question that looked like a simple frequency count but had enough edge cases to trip you up if you weren't careful about what exactly you were counting.

Given a list of user browsing sessions (each a list of product IDs), a target product, and an integer k, return the k products most frequently co-viewed with the target product. Only sessions containing the target product count, the target itself is excluded from results, ties broken by smaller product ID first.

“My first instinct was to just throw everything into a frequency map and sort, which is basically right, but I initially forgot to filter out sessions that don't contain the target at all.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

eBay technical phone screen for a software engineer role, one algorithmic question that looked manageable at first but has enough moving parts to trip you up if you haven't thought carefully about how to track completeness in a single pass.

Given a binary tree, count the number of subtrees that are both complete binary trees and have an even sum. Your solution should run in O(n) time using a post-order traversal where each node returns enough state to verify completeness without re-traversing.

“The even-sum part is trivial, just propagate sums upward.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

eBay software engineer screen that started with a resume walkthrough and then pivoted hard into infrastructure fundamentals. A lot of ground covered fast, felt more like a trivia sprint than a real technical conversation.

Can you walk us through your resume and relevant experience?
How does Redis work under the hood? Explain its architecture.
What is a storage engine and what does it do?
What storage engines does MySQL support, and what data structures do they use internally?
What are Docker and Kubernetes, and what problems do they solve?
What is the difference between Docker containers and traditional virtual machines?

“Standard opener, nothing surprising.”

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eBay interview FAQ

What rounds are in the eBay interview?

Candidates most often report a technical phone screen (32 write-ups), a system design round (9), a behavioral / leadership round (4) and a product sense round (4).

What does the eBay technical phone screen cover?

Across 32 technical phone screen write-ups, the most tagged question topics are Algorithms & Data Structures (34 questions), Technical Trade-offs (33) and System Design (24).