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Lead Engineer – AI Research, Innovation

eBay is seeking a dedicated, highly skilled, and technically hands-on Lead Engineer to join our AIRI division. This is a great opportunity to help lead a highly visible and strategically important AI engineering team at one of the most established and heavily trafficked ecommerce companies in the world.

In this role, you will serve as both a senior technical contributor and a technical leader, guiding a team of AI Engineers in the design, development, and deployment of scalable AI systems. You will help shape the technical direction of key AI initiatives, mentor engineers, drive architectural decisions, and partner closely with Product, Research, Data Engineering, and Software Engineering teams to deliver impactful AI-powered experiences across eBay.

About the Role

As a Lead AI Engineer, you will work across the full AI lifecycle: from early experimentation and prototyping to the production deployment of reliable, scalable, and responsible AI systems that support millions of users.

Your focus will include Generative AI systems, intelligent agents, conversational AI, and agent-based architectures. You will help define and implement the technical roadmap for AI initiatives while ensuring engineering excellence across the team.

This role requires a strong balance of hands-on technical depth and leadership ability. You will be expected to contribute directly to complex technical work while also guiding other Engineers, establishing guidelines, reviewing designs, and helping the team make sound technical decisions.

Our systems handle billions of requests per day, use large-scale GPU clusters, and power key intelligent experiences across the eBay platform.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and optimization of scalable AI systems using Generative AI, LLMs, and agent-based architectures.

• Provide technical leadership to a team of AI Engineers, helping guide architecture, implementation, delivery, and operational excellence.

• Lead the development of agent-led user experiences, including systems that leverage task decomposition, memory, tool use, dynamic planning, and multi-agent orchestration.

• Partner with Product, Research, Data Engineering, and Software Engineering teams to translate business and user needs into effective AI system designs.

• Drive architectural decisions for AI-powered products and platforms, ensuring systems are reliable, maintainable, cost-effective, and production-ready.

• Mentor and coach Engineers through design reviews, code reviews, technical planning, and hands-on problem solving.

• Help advance eBay’s internal platform for GenAI applications by contributing reusable components, APIs, frameworks, patterns, and engineering guidelines.

• Establish and promote guidelines for AI system evaluation, observability, model integration, experimentation, responsible AI, and production monitoring.

• Monitor and optimize AI systems in production for latency, quality, scalability, reliability, cost efficiency, and responsible AI use.

• Lead technical planning and execution for complex AI initiatives, helping the team break down ambiguous problems into clear engineering work.

• Stay ahead of the latest advances in AI, machine learning, LLMs, AI agents, retrieval-augmented generation, and emerging tooling, and apply a practical lens when integrating new technologies into the product stack.

• Drive continuous improvement across design, implementation, evaluation, deployment, and operational processes based on experimentation, data, and team feedback.

• Influence technical strategy across teams and help align engineering efforts with broader organizational goals.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, machine learning engineering, AI engineering, or related technical roles.

• 5+ years of focused experience developing, deploying, and operating AI-centric or ML-powered systems in production environments.

• 2+ years of experience leading technical initiatives, mentoring engineers, or providing technical direction to engineering teams.

• 2+ years building agent-led systems, including LLM-based agents, autonomous workflows, task-planning systems, tool-using agents, or multi-agent orchestration.

• Proven success taking AI-powered products from prototype to production, with a strong emphasis on maintainability, scalability, performance, reliability, and user impact.

• Strong hands-on engineering skills, with the ability to contribute directly to complex system design and implementation.

• Strong programming skills in Java or similar JVM languages, with working proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch, Transformers, and scikit-learn.

• Experience designing and operating production-grade AI systems that serve high-volume, real-world user traffic.

• Experience with conversational AI concepts, including intents, entities, dialogue flows, actions, user journeys, and UX design considerations for interactive systems.

• Hands-on experience with:

• Spring Framework

• Docker and Kubernetes

• Large-scale data technologies such as Hadoop or Spark

• Distributed systems and scalable backend services

• UI/UX considerations in application development

• Production monitoring, observability, and performance optimization

• Strong understanding of AI system evaluation, including quality measurement, experimentation, model behavior analysis, and production feedback loops.

• Ability to lead technical discussions, evaluate tradeoffs, and communicate complex AI concepts clearly to technical and non-technical collaborators.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with C++ and CUDA for performance-critical AI or ML components.

• Familiarity with streaming data systems such as Kafka, Flink, Beam, or Storm.

• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, and knowledge-grounded AI systems.

• Knowledge of tool-use frameworks, agent orchestration platforms, multi-modal model integration, and AI workflow automation.

• Experience building internal AI platforms, developer tools, reusable AI services, or shared ML infrastructure.

• Prior experience leading or influencing a team of AI Engineers, ML Engineers, or Software Engineers in a fast-paced product environment.

• Experience contributing to hiring, onboarding, mentoring, or technical growth of engineering teams.

What We Look For

• A technical leader with deep engineering expertise and the ability to guide a team through complex, ambiguous technical challenges.

• A hands-on builder who can lead by example, contribute directly to critical technical work, and raise the engineering bar for the team.

• A strategic problem solver who can connect AI capabilities to product impact, platform scalability, and long-term technical direction.

• An excellent communicator who can bridge the gap between Research, Engineering, Product, and business collaborators.

• A strong mentor who enjoys developing engineers, sharing knowledge, and creating a collaborative team culture.

• A pragmatic innovator with deep curiosity and hands-on experimentation across the evolving AI agent and Generative AI ecosystem.

• A strong advocate for responsible, ethical, reliable, and user-centered AI systems.

• A collaborative, dedicated leader with genuine excitement to push the boundaries of what is possible with AI at eBay.

Additional Details

This job posting relates to an existing vacancy within eBay.

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, 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.

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