Senior Applied Researcher

About eBay

eBay is a global e-commerce leader that is changing the way the world shops and sells. Our platform empowers millions of buyers and sellers in over 190 markets. We are dedicated to pushing boundaries and reinventing the future of e-commerce for enthusiasts. Our core values center around our customers, authenticity, bold ideas, and inclusivity. We strive to create an ambitious and inclusive work environment, fostering economic opportunity for all. Join a team of passionate thinkers, innovators, and dreamers to build communities and shape the future of global commerce.

About the Search & Recommendations Team

The Search & Recommendations team at eBay focuses on delivering recommendations at scale and in near real-time to buyers on our website and native app platforms. Recommendations are crucial for how buyers navigate eBay's vast inventory. The team develops state-of-the-art recommendation systems, including agentic workflows, deep learning-based retrieval systems for personalized recommendations, machine-learned ranking models, and advanced MLOps in a high-volume e-commerce setting. We are building cutting-edge agentic workflows and recommender systems powered by the latest ML, NLP, LLM, and AI techniques. We are seeking an AI innovator to drive the execution of these efforts into production at eBay's scale. You will collaborate closely with leaders and teams across the globally distributed Search & Recommendations organization, including product managers, engineers, and applied research leaders, to brainstorm, build, and deliver future personalized e-commerce shopping experiences.

What You Will Accomplish

• Develop agentic workflows, evaluations, and models for various surfaces at eBay.
• Collaborate with a team of applied researchers and engineers with deep expertise in NLP, LLMs/AI/agentic workflows, recommender systems, and ML production engineering.
• Influence the future interaction with recommender systems and the evolution of recommender system technology.
• Work with unique and large datasets of unstructured multimodal data representing eBay's inventory and millions of users.
• Develop and deploy state-of-the-art AI models.
• Deploy big data technology and large-scale data pipelines.
• Drive marketplace GMB through iterative A/B testing.

What You Will Bring

• MS/PhD in Computer Science or related field with 6+ years of relevant work experience (or BS/BA with 8+ years) in Engineering / Machine Learning / AI.
• Extensive development experience, preferably in an ML/AI technology environment (Python, PyTorch, etc.).
• Experience with cloud services, big data pipelines, and databases.
• Experience in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and industrial recommender systems.
• Experience in production engineering practices and software development in an OO language (Scala, Java, etc.).
• Previous publications experience with academic papers, patents/IP, or technical blogs is a plus.

Additional Details

eBay is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, and disability, or other legally protected status. If you require accommodation, please contact talent@ebay.com. We use cookies to enhance your experience and may use AI tools for administrative tasks in the hiring process. Visit our Talent Privacy Notice, Privacy Center, and AI Hiring Guidelines for more information.

Key skills/competency

• Senior Applied Researcher
• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing
• Large Language Models
• Recommender Systems
• Agentic Workflows
• Big Data
• Python
• PyTorch