I’ve been working at eBay for almost a year. My first project was very exciting, as it involved data analysis, data modeling, machine learning, and engineering, which allowed me to take advantage of my PhD experience in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Our team built eBay Shopbot from scratch, and I contributed a lot to its backend storage service capabilities.

I’m currently working with eBay’s identity team in the New Product Division where we are prototyping some interesting ideas for personalization. Our goal is to provide a highly personalized shopping experience when customers interact with our Shopbot, so we’re managing and organizing user identity attributes such as name, gender, and interests to build personal profiles for each Shopbot user.

I believe that providing a highly personalized shopping experience will delight our users by presenting to them only items that they are most likely to buy and saving them lots of time in the process.

eBay has a great culture, it’s friendly, supportive, and it truly values talent. It’s an environment that really encourages you to discover your potential. As I approach my one-year anniversary, I hope to advance in my career by tackling increasingly challenging and interesting problems. I think I’m off to a good start: Our team recently got a cash bonus because our identity service had zero on-call escalations for more than three months in a row! We are very proud to have built such a highly reliable service.