eBay's Technical Fellow and former Senior Director of Research Labs & Finding Eric Billingsley left eBay this month to join Google as Engineering Director. He is credited with helping to build eBay's search engine in 2002 with Louis Monier, who had left eBay for Google in 2005. Billingsley had previously worked for Monier at AltaVista in the 1990s and followed him to BigVine and later to eBay.

Billingsley gave a keynote address at the 2007 eBay Developers Conference where he revealed that eBay was planning to rebuild the eBay technology as a series of modular services rather than a single application. He said at the time that the component-based design would make it quicker to build applications by providing pre-built services that could be combined to create new applications without extensive coding. In 2008, eBay announced it would indeed open the platform in a project called Project Echo, now in beta as Selling Manager Applications.

Billingsley was one of three Technical Fellows at eBay, and was charged with using technology to find solutions to the challenges focusing on efforts in Search, Product Optimization, and IT.

Edited 7/24/09 to correct title.