Ebay Software Engineer Interview Guide

The process started out fine, but it turned into a scheduling mess pretty quickly. I had a recruiter phone screen first, and then a technical round that was supposed to be the next step, but even getting that lined up was frustrating because interviewers canceled at the last minute more than once. The reasons felt pretty unprofessional, like being in another meeting or claiming I had not accepted the invite even though eBay had sent it. After that, the coordinator kept telling me there were more rounds to schedule, so the whole thing felt slow and disconnected between the hiring manager and recruiting team.

On the technical side, the interview itself was mostly backend and Java/Spring focused. They asked about my background and recent projects, then moved into questions like what was new in Java 17 and the difference between Spring and Spring Boot. In the backend design round, I had to whiteboard a Spring Boot API and talk through the usual layers like service, repository, controller, and model. A lot of the discussion was around dependency injection, especially when to use constructor versus method injection, and how to handle exceptions in controllers. They also asked how to switch application properties based on environment, including what profiles are and how to set environment variables. One question I didn’t fully answer was how to handle exceptions globally outside of AOP and exception handlers, and the interviewer pointed to advice, which I should have been more ready to discuss.

Overall, the questions were reasonable for a senior role and not especially hard algorithmically, but the process itself was very slow and unorganized. I ended up with no offer, and honestly the experience was bad enough that I had already decided I wouldn’t want to join even if they had extended one. My main takeaway is to be ready for practical Spring Boot backend design and core Java/Spring concepts, but also be prepared for a process that may not be smooth.