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 1billion 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, Item).
- Have 95th percentile response time of <50ms. 
- Serve 700+ production applications powering over 100 pages, 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, tracking.
- Unifies Search & navigation, across pages. Funnels users to right experiences without impact to 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 10% lift in traffic, 4% to conversion and 20% lift in module engagement traffic.

Supporting documentation is attached, including Critical Talent Award from CEO of eBay and Letter of recommendation from eBay's VP of engineering. Product demos, conference talks and research paper submitted for this are also included. Financial & product metrics related information are proprietary and cannot be shared.