Sr. AI Engineer

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.

About the Opportunity

This opportunity is for builders who thrive between ambiguity and execution. At eBay, you will help define and deliver the next wave of AI-powered marketplace experiences by turning emerging ideas into measurable outcomes. Success in this role means creating new capabilities that improve customer and business impact at scale.

We are looking for a Senior AI Engineer with a strong focus on AI research and innovation, combining deep experimentation with systems-building execution. You will own the full lifecycle of applied AI initiatives: problem framing, experimentation, prototyping, and production hardening. The role combines research depth with strong systems execution across modeling, serving, and product integration. This is not a pure research role and not a pure backend role. You will own end-to-end vertical slices and partner closely with software engineers, researchers, data engineers, product, and design.

What you will accomplish

Research and Modeling

• Design, train, and evaluate systems across LLMs, retrieval, ranking, personalization, multimodal AI, and agent architectures.
• Apply fine-tuning, distillation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and orchestration strategies to improve quality and efficiency.
• Run structured experiments and reason clearly about quality, latency, reliability, and cost tradeoffs.
• Translate ambiguous product problems into modeling and system strategies that can be validated with users.

Applied AI Systems and Platform

• Design and build advanced AI capabilities across LLM workflows, retrieval systems, ranking, personalization, multimodal experiences, and agent-led interactions.
• Develop reusable platform components, APIs, and best practices for AI application development.
• Evaluate and integrate new models, tools, and frameworks with a critical, production-first lens.
• Contribute to responsible AI practices, including safety, monitoring, and governance.

Systems and Scaling

• Build scalable inference pipelines and services for high-throughput, low-latency workloads.
• Optimize batching, streaming, caching, and request orchestration in distributed and async environments.
• Improve production systems across latency, throughput, reliability, observability, and unit economics.
• Partner with infrastructure teams to leverage GPU-enabled and cloud-native environments effectively.

Application Integration and Prototyping

• Integrate AI capabilities into real APIs, applications, and user experiences.
• Design end-to-end systems from data ingestion and model serving to user interaction.
• Build prototypes that demonstrate user value, not only model-level metrics.
• Own delivery from idea to deployed prototype and production iteration.

What you will bring

• 8+ years of software engineering and/or machine learning engineering experience.
• 4+ years of focused experience building and deploying AI-centric systems.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience with LLM-based agents, autonomous workflows, or multi-agent orchestration.
• Strong programming skills in Java or similar JVM languages, with working proficiency in Python.
• Production experience with modern ML tooling and frameworks (for example: PyTorch, Transformers, scikit-learn).
• Proven experience taking AI-powered products from prototype to production with strong maintainability and operational quality.
• Experience designing scalable backend services and APIs for real-world traffic.
• Familiarity with distributed systems, async processing, and reactive architectures.
• Ability to move from ambiguous problem statements to working systems with clear technical judgment.
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across research, engineering, and product.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Spring-based service development.
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production environments.
• Familiarity with big data and processing ecosystems (for example: Spark, Hadoop).
• Experience with streaming systems (for example: Kafka, Flink, Beam).
• Experience with RAG pipelines, vector stores, tool-use frameworks, and multimodal model integration.
• Exposure to GPU optimization and performance tuning (for example: CUDA, inference optimization techniques).
• Experience building conversational AI systems (intents, entities, dialog flows, and interaction design).
• Ability to create lightweight frontend or internal tooling to accelerate prototyping and validation.

What We Value

• Researchers who can ship and engineers who can reason from first principles.
• Builders who read papers and implement ideas pragmatically.
• Strong ownership from prototype to measurable business and user impact.
• Deep curiosity about the evolving AI ecosystem and the ability to evaluate new approaches critically.
• A commitment to responsible, ethical, and reliable AI systems.

Additional Details

The base pay range for this position is expected in the range below:
$156,800 - $255,300

Base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including location, skills, and experience. The total compensation package for this position may also include other elements, including a target bonus and restricted stock units (as applicable) in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits (including 401(k) eligibility and various paid time off benefits, such as PTO and parental leave). Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.

If hired, employees will be in an "at-will position" and the Company reserves the right to modify base salary (as well as any other discretionary payment or compensation program) at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, Company or individual department/team performance, and market factors.

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 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. It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

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