Julie Cheng
Sr Director of Engineering
eBay
I run the engineering organization for Advertising. The system I built allows eBay Sellers to promote their listings to be discovered by potential buyers more easily.
I have been in advertising for over 23 years. The domain is fairly large, and what keeps it interesting for me is the evolution of technology for this industry. The biggest change in my experience is the move to mobile and smartphones. Now we are at another pivot point with AI. I can't wait to see what we do with it!
I am in a lot of meetings that range from strategic roadmap reviews to one-on-ones with various team members. I end up catching up on emails, Slack channel communications, and actual work at the end of my day.
I have a undergraduate degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Kellogg Northwestern University. I started my career as an engineer, then took a detour as a product manager at eBay. I was the head of products for Yahoo! and Apple. During my time at Apple, I realized I missed being close to technology. I returned back to engineering as an individual contributor (IC). I have been back in engineering since then. I was most recently at Google before boomeranging back to eBay.
I would love to live abroad and go back to school for a PhD. In what subject? That's for the future Julie to decide.
I enjoy the outdoors, such as hiking and running. I love to travel with my family. And once the fitchen remodeling is done, I can go back to cooking. And if I ever find time, I would love to go back to oil painting.
"I believe luck is preparation meeting opportunity. If you hadn't been prepared when the opportunity came along, you wouldn't have been 'lucky'." - Oprah Winfrey