eBay’s product and technology organization was strengthened today with the announcement of Pete Thompson as Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer, and Mazen Rawashdeh as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. Both will be members of eBay’s executive leadership team, reporting to President and CEO Devin Wenig.
Thompson brings more than 20 years of experience building new products and services across a range of industries and technologies. Thompson joins eBay from Amazon where he served as Vice President of Alexa Voice Service. Previously, he was Chief Operating Officer of TiVo where he drove the merger and integration between Rovi and TiVo. Prior to TiVo, he held executive roles at a variety of companies, including Microsoft, T-Mobile, Ericsson, and Sonos.
As eBay’s product experience leader, Thompson will be focused on simplifying an increasingly personalized and discovery-based shopping experience, while providing the enhanced tools and insights that help eBay sellers succeed.
eBay veteran Rawashdeh spent eight years in technology leadership roles with the Company from 2003 to 2011 before departing to serve as Vice President, Infrastructure Operation Engineering at Twitter where he helped scale the business through its IPO. After four additional years as an angel investor and tech advisor, Rawashdeh returned to eBay in 2016 to lead Platform Engineering. As Chief Technology Officer, Rawashdeh will continue to lead platform engineering and the Company’s infrastructure and platform architecture, as well as AI, research and data science, payment and risk engineering, and eBay’s third-party developer ecosystem and APIs.
Thompson starts July 29 and, like Rawashdeh, will be based in San Jose, CA.
eBay is also announcing the arrival of two additional executives who will expand the company’s leadership experience across search and product analytics:
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VP, Search Engineering: Starting today, Scott Gaffney will join eBay, applying 20 years of experience — including most recently as VP Engineering, Web Search & Intelligent Agents at Yahoo — to eBay’s search technology teams.
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VP, Product Analytics: Steve Metz is returning to eBay, where he has spent most of his career, from Amazon. Metz will be charged with further enhancing the eBay buying and selling experience by leveraging new product and business insights from eBay’s vast ecosystem. He will start August 12.