Started working for eBay Inc in San José, CA, USA.

This is a very much delayed blog entry stating that I join eBay's Search Engine team in San José, California.

eBay needs no introduction. It is one of the biggest e-commerce marketplaces in the world, connecting buyers and sellers from around the world. Depending on the metric and time frame, it is the fifth largest marketplace in the world by gross merchandise volume (GMV), behind Alibaba (Taobao and Tmall), Amazon, and JD.com. According to other statistics, it the second most visited global e-commerce and shopping website, again after Amazon.com (see Statista statistic). At the same time, its market cap is much smaller than that of those competitors, because it does not have inventory and only facilitates the transactions. It is an exciting company with lots of potential.

The search engine which powers eBay handles 80 billion queries on 3 billion documents every day. The index is distributed on tens of thousands geographically distributed servers. My job will be to improve the custom C++ search engine enabling customers to locate items to buy. There is an academic publication titled "The Architecture of eBay Search" presented at SIGIR eCom 2017 which contains more publicly available information about the search engine.

I am excited to have joined eBay's technical team in San José, California, USA.

Moving during the Covid-19 pandemic from Germany to California was challenge. But more about that in a future blog post.