Senior Manager, Applied Research

At eBay, we're more than a global ecommerce leader — we’re changing the way the world shops and sells. Our platform empowers millions of buyers and sellers in more than 190 markets around the world. We’re committed to pushing boundaries and leaving our mark as we reinvent the future of ecommerce for enthusiasts.

Our customers are our compass, authenticity thrives, bold ideas are welcome, and everyone can bring their unique selves to work — every day. We're in this together, sustaining the future of our customers, our company, and our planet.

Join a team of passionate thinkers, innovators, and dreamers — and help us connect people and build communities to create economic opportunity for all.

Looking for a company that inspires passion, courage and creativity, where you can be on the team shaping the future of global commerce? Want to shape how millions of people buy, sell, connect, and share around the world? If you’re interested in joining a purpose driven community that is dedicated to crafting an ambitious and inclusive work environment, join eBay – a company you can be proud to be with.

Our Shipping team is at the heart of the e-commerce experience, influencing key buying/selling decisions by surfacing the best shipping options and ensuring a seamless post-purchase delivery journey for millions of buyers and sellers. Shipping is a critical component of trust and satisfaction on our platform. Our team develops and deploys sophisticated machine learning models to solve complex logistics challenges, such as predicting accurate delivery dates, optimizing shipping costs and options, and modeling complex carrier networks. We operate at a massive scale, leveraging advanced MLOps to deliver these critical services in a high-volume, low latency global e-commerce environment.

We are building a cutting-edge shipping intelligence platform powered by the latest ML, deep learning, natural language processing, large language models and AI techniques. We are looking for an AI leader and innovator who can lead a team of applied researchers and engineers, hire top talent when necessary, and get complex predictive systems into production at eBay scale. The candidate will work closely with leaders and other teams from our globally distributed Shipping organization, including product managers, operations, and analytics leaders, to brainstorm and enable a more predictable, efficient, and transparent shipping experience for our users.

This is an opportunity to:

• Lead and manage a team of applied researchers and engineers with deep expertise in natural language processing, large language models / AI, recommender systems, and ML production engineering
• Drive personalization strategy for eBay recommendations and influence look and feel of the eBay homepage
• Influence how customers will interact with shipping AI systems in the future and drive AI technology evolution and adoption
• Work with unique and large data sets of unstructured multimodal data representing eBay's vast and varied 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 revenue, margin and customer delight by driving lower shipping costs, faster delivery speed and accurate product classifications for international shipments

Qualifications

• MS/PhD in Computer Science or related area with 8 years of relevant work experience (or BS/BA with 10 years) in Engineering / Machine Learning / AI
• Experience leading a nimble applied science team, preferably in a ML/AI technology environment
• Experience with using cloud services, big data pipelines and databases
• Experience in Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models
• Experience in production engineering practices and software development in an OO language (Scala, Java, etc.) and high-volume traffic webapp development in an industrial setting
• Previous publications experience with academic papers, patents/IP, or technical blogs is a plus