eBay lost an important employee last week (the VP of product development at PayPal jumped to Google) but things are now looking up on the personnel front.  The company’s managed to poach one staff member each from Bing and Facebook, and both men have rather impressive resumes.

Let’s discuss them in alphabetical order.  Dennis DeCoste hails from Facebook, where he held the title "research scientist."  Before that, he served as principal scientist at Bing and director of research at Yahoo Research.  Then, to go even further back, DeCoste once worked as principal scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Now DeCoste will help eBay by acting as its director of research, according to Tricia Duryee.

The second new guy is Scott Prevost, and Duryee reported that he will assume the title "VP of product management on search."  Prevost used to serve as principal development manager at Bing, and got that role by acting as general manager and director of product at Powerset before Microsoft acquired it.

Prevost also held down jobs at the Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab earlier in his career.

All in all, then, eBay seems to have secured some real assets.  It should be interesting to see what DeCoste and Prevost accomplish in their new positions.