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eBay interview notes, page 4 of 6

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

May 2026
eBay software engineer interview where they had me extend a file system design with user ownership and storage quotas. Pretty focused on getting the state management right under constraints.
  • You're given an in-memory file system that already handles basic file operations and a prefix/suffix search. Extend it to support user accounts with storage capacity limits: adding a user returns false on duplicates, and adding a file by user rejects if the user doesn't exist, the file already exists, or the upload would push the user over their storage cap.

“The core of the question is really just bookkeeping.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Prepped for a senior-level loop at eBay focused almost entirely on leadership and scope. Three questions, all behavioral, all expecting you to have a real story ready with numbers and trade-offs attached.
  • Tell me about a time you influenced a major decision.
  • Describe a project where you had significant impact or worked at a large scale.
  • What is the most technically complex problem you've tackled in your career?

“This one tripped me up a bit because my first instinct was to talk about a technical call I made solo, which isn't really influence.”

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eBay·Backend Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
eBay system design round focused entirely on a food delivery backend, specifically around handling the lunch and dinner rush. Pretty intense scope for a single session, they wanted depth on basically everything from order routing to payment retries.
  • Design the backend of a food delivery app, with particular focus on handling peak-hour order spikes during lunch and dinner rushes.
  • How would you handle surge pricing and capacity reservation during peak demand periods?
  • How do you mitigate hotspots caused by a single very popular restaurant or a dense geographic area getting flooded with orders?
  • Walk me through how you'd ensure reliability across partial failures, including retry strategies and idempotency for orders and payments.
  • What observability would you put in place, and how would you define SLOs specifically for surge periods?

“This was the main question and it ate up most of the session.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

Jun 2026
Had a behavioral/background screen for a Software Engineer role at eBay. Pretty standard stuff: walk through your resume, talk about a recent project, explain what you do day to day. Nothing too wild but the follow-up questions caught me a bit off guard.
  • Walk me through your background and experience.
  • Tell me about a recent project you worked on. What was the problem, what was your role, what decisions did you make, and what was the outcome?
  • What does your typical day-to-day look like as an engineer?

“Tried to keep it tight but I always end up rambling somewhere in the middle.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jun 2026
Three coding problems for an eBay software engineer round. Pretty classic leetcode territory but they stacked them back to back which made the pacing rough. No behavioral stuff, just code.
  • Given a number of tasks and a list of prerequisite pairs, determine whether all tasks can be completed (i.e. detect if the dependency graph contains a cycle).
  • Design a data structure that supports inserting words and querying by exact match or by prefix.
  • Implement a fixed-capacity cache that evicts the least recently used item when full, with O(1) get and put operations.

“Cycle detection in a directed graph.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
eBay software engineer interview that mixed functional programming concepts with a pretty thorough data structures breakdown. Two distinct problem areas in one session, which felt a bit compressed but manageable.
  • Implement a function applyTwice(f, x) that takes a function and a value and returns f(f(x)). Walk through how you'd pass functions as parameters, and explain closures and side effects.
  • Compare arrays, linked lists, stacks, and queues. Give time and space complexities for insert, delete, search, and iteration, and explain when you'd actually choose one over another.

“I actually liked this one.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
eBay software engineer interview with a single deep-dive question about complexity. Pretty open-ended format, which I wasn't fully prepared for.
  • What is the most complex thing you have worked on professionally, and what made it complex? Walk through how you broke it down and what came out of it.

“Picked a project that was genuinely hard but realized mid-answer I was spending too long on the background and not enough on what I actually did.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
eBay SWE interview that focused on extending a file system design with a copy operation. Pretty focused scope but the edge cases were where things got interesting.
  • You have a file system backed by a path-to-metadata map and per-user usage counters. Add a copyFile(fromName, toName) operation that returns false if the source doesn't exist, if the destination already exists, or if copying would push the source file's owner over their storage capacity. Otherwise copy the file metadata and return true. Walk through your data structures and the complexity.

“The basic logic was fine, check existence, check collision, copy metadata.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
eBay software engineering interview with a product recommendation problem that looked approachable on the surface but had some real complexity hiding in the follow-ups. The Java refactoring question at the end caught me a bit flat-footed.
  • You're given a list of browser sessions, each containing a target product ID and other product IDs. For every other product that appears in the same session as the target, count how many sessions they co-occur in. Return the top k products by co-occurrence count, sorted descending with tie-breaking by product ID.
  • How would you refactor this solution for production-quality Java, using Streams, immutable maps, and a clean separation of concerns?

“I got the frequency map part pretty quickly but fumbled the bucket sort explanation for a bit.”

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eBay·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Two behavioral questions for an Android Engineer role at eBay. Pretty standard stuff, nothing technical, just the classic intro and a challenge story. Felt more like a screening conversation than a real round.
  • Walk me through your background: your education, the roles you've held, what you specialize in technically, and what you're looking for in your next role. Keep it to about 2-3 minutes.
  • Describe the most challenging project or situation in your career. What made it hard, what was your specific role, how did you handle it, and what was the result?

“I always think I have this one locked and then ramble past the time limit.”

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