eBay Snags Former Amazon Alexa Executive
Online platform eBay announced it has tapped Peter Thompson, former vice president of Amazon’s Alexa Voice Services, as its new senior vice president and chief product officer.
In addition, eBay appointed Mazen Rawashdeh senior vice president and chief technology officer, the company announced in a press release. Thompson and Rawashdeh will report to eBay President and CEO Devin Wenig.
Thompson has more than 20 years of experience building new products and services across a range of industries and technologies. Before his work at Amazon, he was chief operating officer of TiVo and held executive roles at Microsoft, T-Mobile, Ericsson and Sonos.
He will focus on simplifying discovery-based shopping experiences while providing enhanced tools and insights to further help eBay sellers succeed.
Rawashdeh had technology leadership roles with eBay from 2003 to 2011 before heading over to Twitter to serve as vice president of infrastructure operation engineering at Twitter. He then spent four years as an angel investor and tech advisor before returning to eBay in 2016 to lead Platform Engineering.
As CTO, Rawashdeh will continue to lead platform engineering, infrastructure and architecture, as well as artificial intelligence (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 said.
In March, eBay agreed to review its StubHub and eBay Classifieds businesses, as well as appoint two new directors to its board, to avoid a proxy fight with activist investors.
Earlier this month, eBay said it is in favor of Facebook’s planned cryptocurrency, Libra. “We are sponsors of this, in part, because crypto and blockchain, in particular, have great promise,” said Wenig. “A well-run public blockchain that the marketplaces adopt could do immense good.”
The eCommerce giant posted Q4 results in January that met and even beat expectations. The firm outlined a strategy that focuses on technology, payments intermediation and capital allocation.
In 2018, eBay sued Amazon alleging that Amazon has over the past several years “perpetrated a scheme to infiltrate and exploit eBay’s internal member email system.”