About the team and the role: The Agentic Systems Research team is building the next generation of intelligent systems that assist buyers and sellers across eBay's global marketplace. Our mission is to develop AI agents capable of reasoning, planning, and acting across complex commerce environments, helping users discover products, make decisions, manage inventory, and complete transactions more effectively.
As an Applied Researcher, you will work at the intersection of large language models, retrieval systems, recommender systems, and agent architectures to develop AI systems that can operate reliably in real-world commerce workflows. You will collaborate with engineers, product leaders, and other researchers to transform research ideas into production systems used by millions of customers.
This role combines applied research, experimentation, and system development to advance the science and practice of agentic AI in large-scale marketplaces.
What you will accomplish:- Design and prototype agentic AI systems capable of multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool use across eBay's marketplace infrastructure.
- Develop and evaluate LLM-based systems for commerce tasks such as product discovery, listing creation, pricing guidance, customer support, and seller assistance.
- Advance retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and knowledge-grounded AI techniques for reasoning over structured marketplace data including catalog information, listings, and seller tools.
- Build robust evaluation frameworks for agentic systems, including offline evaluation, synthetic task generation, human evaluation, and online experimentation.
- Collaborate closely with engineering teams to translate research prototypes into reliable production systems operating at large scale.
- Analyze large-scale datasets to understand user behavior and improve AI-driven relevance, personalization, and decision support.
- Contribute to the broader AI research community through technical publications, patents, and conference presentations where appropriate.
What you will bring: - Education: Ph.D. or M.S. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a related technical field.
Technical Expertise:
- Strong understanding of modern machine learning and deep learning techniques, particularly in areas such as: Large Language Models (LLMs), Natural Language Processing, Recommender systems and personalization, Information retrieval and search, Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) etc.
- Experience working with large-scale datasets and distributed data processing systems.
- Strong programming skills in Python and modern ML frameworks, with experience working with large-scale data platforms such as Spark or similar distributed systems.
Research & Problem Solving
- Experience designing and running machine learning experiments, including hypothesis development, ablation studies, error analysis, and model iteration.
- Familiarity with evaluation methodologies such as offline metrics, human evaluation, and A/B testing.
- Strong analytical skills and ability to derive insights from large-scale behavioral data.
Collaboration & Communication
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
- Ability to work effectively in cross-functional teams spanning research, engineering, and product.
Bonus ExperienceExperience with agentic AI systems, such as:
- Tool-using LLMs
- Multi-step workflows and planning
- Memory or stateful agents
- Orchestration frameworks
- Agent evaluation and reliability techniques
- Experience applying machine learning to large-scale consumer products or e-commerce systems.
Additional DetailsThe base pay range for this position is expected in the range below:
C$142,400 - C$190,100
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 RRSP eligibility, 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.
This job posting relates to an existing vacancy within eBay.
