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 Recommendations team works on delivering recommendations at scale and in near real time to our buyers on our website and native app platforms. Recommendations are a core part of how our buyers navigate eBay’s vast and varied inventory. Our team develops state-of-the-art recommendations systems, including deep learning based retrieval systems for personalized recommendations, machine learned ranking models, as well as advanced MLOps in a high volume traffic industrial e-commerce setting.

We are building cutting edge recommender systems powered by the latest ML, NLP, LLM 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, as well as get systems into production at eBay scale. The candidate will work closely with leaders and other teams from our globally distributed Recommendations organization, including product managers, design, and analytics leaders to brainstorm and enable future personalized recommendation user experiences.

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 people will interact with recommender systems in the future, and how recommender systems technology will evolve

• 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 GMB as well as advertising revenue via organic and sponsored recommendations

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 engineering/research team, preferably in a ML/AI technology environment

• Experience with using 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.) and high volume traffic webapp development in an industrial setting

• Previous publications experience with academic papers, patents/IP, or technical blogs is a plus.

Links to some of our previous work:

• Tech Blog 2025 (Multimodal GenAI)

• Tech Blog 2025 (GenAI Agentic Platform)

• RecSys 2024 Workshop paper

• Google Cloud Blog 2024

• eBay Tech Blog 2023

• eBay Tech Blog 2022

• RecSys 2021 paper

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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 have a need that requires accommodation, please contact us at talent@ebay.com. We will make every effort to respond to your request for accommodation as soon as possible. View our accessibility statement to learn more about eBay's commitment to ensuring digital accessibility for people with disabilities.

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