I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at eBay (San Jose, CA) in Jul 2011
Interview
I was approached by a recruiter who found me on LinkedIn, who passed me to an internal recruiter once I expressed interest in the position and the company. I had a brief 30-minute phone screen with the hiring manager, who asked me some fairly light technical questions before ending the call. I received an invitation to interview onsite from the internal recruiter shortly after the phone screen.
I ended up coming onsite about a week and a half later to interview. I was set to interview for 5 hours with 6 people, but it ended up being about 6 hours and 45 minutes with 7 people (I'm glad that I took the entire day off work). I had 7 1:1 interviews that lasted about 45 minutes each. They were very intense and I was grilled quite extensively on my technical expertise.
At the end, I wasn't sure how I did because there were a few questions that I felt that I could have answered better. However, I was impressed at the intelligence and deep knowledge of my interviewers, and got the impression that the company and team would be a place that I could learn and grow.
The end-to-end process from initial contact to offer seemed to take longer than at other companies, so don't be surprised at this.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
What would you change or improve about the eBay site?
How would you design a process to populate a set of tables in a database with data if you had no previous information about the tables or their columns?
I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at eBay (London, England) in Nov 2025
Interview
Very pleasant interview experience, technical interviews are thorough and one of them quite novel in terms of providing a hypothetical production scenario for you to solve on the spot. Engineering manager, recruiter are quick to respond.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implementing business logic module for weight and price calculation
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at eBay (London, England)
Interview
The recruiter contacted me about the job. After a brief discussion, we decided it made sense to proceed. The process continued with the engineering manager. The interview was an hour long. There were no questions about the projects, technical execution or what you had built in other companies. The engineering manager lacked energy and had difficulty explaining the expectancy or depth of the job. I couldn't see enough technical skills. Instead, there was too focus on a particular methodology or technology. Ultimately, the decision rests with the engineering manager's subjective judgment. It is really bizarre and inadequate. I haven't seen this before. On a positive note, the recruiter was approachable.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Very few questions about the practices which are followed where you are working.
Had an initial phone screen followed by virtual onsite. I thought I did fairly ok in the onsite but one of the interviewers seemed super smug and discouraging and straight up told me that I don't have the experience required for the role. This was a coding interview and they were almost disappointed to see that I was able to solve the question. I mean why even interview someone and waste their time if you don't think they have the required experience. I never heard back from the recruiter ever in spite of sending them a reminder email. Bitter experience overall.
