Universal Render & Header Platform at eBay: Drives Engagement, Streamlines Navigation & Accelerates product agility

Damodaran is a staff software engineer at eBay. He is known for architecting and building eBay's Horizontal apps - Header & Navigation platform and the Universal Widget Render platform (UX platform as a service). Collectively these platforms serve over 1 billion calls in traffic, at scale.

Prior to these solutions, delivering site-wide targeted UX wasn't seamless. Every page had its technology stack. Integrating with each was a herculean effort. Next, the impact of the header and navigation failing was costly as users wouldn't be able to sign in, search and navigate, access the shopping cart, or view notifications. These platforms solve it.

Through them, he has produced innovations in:
- operational efficiencies through technology,
- web asset optimization,
- rendering, caching & transclusion of a remote app output into a host app.

He is a recipient of eBay's Critical Talent Award for these successful initiatives that have helped eBay strategically.

Collectively these platforms,
- Achieve decoupled releases without dependencies on partners pages (like Search, and Item).
- Have 95th percentile response time of <50ms. 
- Serve 700+ production applications powering over 100 pages of mobile apps.
- Have onboarded >30 eBay teams with 150+ use cases for delivering visual and non-visual modules across eBay

With this, eBay now
- Delivers targeted UX anywhere, across pages —search, payments, etc., based on a wide gamut of business rules, priorities, rendering modes with experimentation, and tracking.
- Unifies Search & navigation, across pages. Funnels users to the right experiences without impacting performance.
- Operates through a declarative approach, letting partner teams build impactful UX in weeks instead of months accelerating product agility.
- A 5% lift to module customer satisfaction scores, funneled experiences saw a 10% lift in traffic, 4% to conversion, and a 20% lift in module engagement traffic.