Senior Member of Technical Staff

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

Senior Technical Staff Member Applied Research (T27)

Position Overview

eBay is looking for a Senior Member of Technical Staff Applied Research to update the search stack and develop new conversational search and natural language query features. This role involves hands-on work as an individual contributor who can shift between applied research quick prototyping production deployment and close collaboration with engineering and product teams.

This position centers on improving how users convey shopping intent through natural language and how eBay interprets retrieves ranks and responds to those signals in modern search experiences. The ideal candidate blends solid research instincts with practical production skills and is eager to transform new NLP and LLM capabilities into scalable systems that deliver clear customer and business results.

Based in San Jose the role partners with applied research search engineering product and platform teams to improve discovery foundations and foster richer conversational experiences.

• Build prototype and productionize solutions for conversational search and natural language query understanding
• Assist in updating the search stack across query understanding retrieval ranking and response generation layers
• Develop methods for intent understanding query rewriting semantic retrieval result grounding and multi-turn refinement
• Partner with science and engineering teams to integrate data-informed approaches into production systems with strong latency quality and reliability characteristics
• Build and evaluate NLQ solutions that help buyers express complex shopping needs more naturally and get more relevant outcomes
• Build offline and online evaluation frameworks for conversational quality retrieval efficiency relevance and customer impact
• Contribute technical depth on model selection timely and system build experimentation and measurement
• Raise the technical bar through hands-on implementation code reviews build discussions and cross-team collaboration

• This is a highly practical individual contributor role not a people-management position
• Success relies on technical implementation prototyping speed and the capacity to transform unclear problem areas into functional systems
• The role combines applied research with product-focused engineering placing a strong emphasis on delivering practical improvements in conversational search and NLQ.

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Engineering or a related technical area or equivalent hands-on experience
• 8 years of experience in applied research machine learning search NLP or related engineering roles
• Strong hands-on experience building and shipping production-quality ML NLP or search systems
• Deep expertise in one or more of the following areas:

Dialogue-based search and information retrieval

Large language model applications for search assistance or question answering

• Strong coding and system development skills with the ability to independently drive complex technical work from concept through production
• Demonstrated ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs across quality latency scalability and maintainability

• Advanced degree such as an MS or PhD in Computer Science Machine Learning NLP Information Retrieval or a related field or equivalent experience
• Experience modernizing search or discovery systems in ecommerce consumer technology or large-scale digital platforms
• Experience working on natural language query platforms conversational interfaces or LLM-powered product experiences
• Track record of translating research ideas into product impact through experimentation and iterative deployment
• Strong communication skills and the ability to guide technical direction across partner teams without formal authority

This position is located in San Jose California. It involves close cooperation with both local and remote teams and demands effective interaction across departments and locations.

Occasional travel may be needed for planning reviews and partner collaboration.

This role will help build the technical foundations of how conversational commerce evolves at eBay. You will develop systems that let customers search more naturally express intent more richly and discover the right inventory with less effort and more confidence!

Additional Details

The base pay range for this position is expected in the range below:

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.

Remote roles are not eligible for U.S. visa sponsorship.

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 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 eBays 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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