About the team and the role: Join us as the Director, Agentic Shopping, and lead the charge in transforming the future of ecommerce! This role is pivotal in crafting intelligent shopping experiences that help customers discover, evaluate, and make confident decisions through AI-powered interactions.
Located in San Jose, you will collaborate closely with product, design, and cross-functional executives to define strategy, drive execution, and build world-class shopping experiences.
What you will accomplish:- Define and drive the applied research strategy for agentic shopping and conversational search at eBay
- Lead teams developing core capabilities such as shopping intent understanding, conversational retrieval, response generation, multi-turn refinement, ranking optimization, and evaluation
- Partner with product and engineering leaders to turn emerging AI capabilities into customer-facing experiences with clear business value
- Build systems that improve how buyers explore inventory, compare options, refine intent, and complete high-confidence shopping decisions
- Establish robust experimentation and measurement frameworks for conversational quality, relevance, customer happiness, and downstream marketplace outcomes
- Guide architecture and technical tradeoffs across model choice, latency, reliability, cost, and trustworthiness in production systems
- Help define the operating model for scaling new conversational and agentic experiences from pilot programs into durable platform capabilities
- Develop a high-performing team culture grounded in technical excellence, inclusive leadership, and strong execution
Leadership Proficiencies and Operating Principles:- Customer-centric approach. You treat relevance and discovery as customer problems first, building systems that better understand intent and improve quality continuously.
- Platform thinking and leverage. You build reusable capabilities, infrastructure, and APIs that enable multiple teams to build on shared foundations rather than reinventing solutions independently.
- Data-informed execution at scale. You operate with rigor across the full lifecycle from hypothesis and offline validation through experimentation, rollout, monitoring, and iteration.
- Multi-year strategy with pragmatic sequencing. You can place thoughtful long-term bets while delivering near-term outcomes and maintaining operational excellence.
- Leader-of-leaders capability. You build organizations intentionally, develop senior talent, compose clarity in ambiguity, and scale culture across teams and geographies.
What you will bring: - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or comparable hands-on experience.
- 12+ years of experience in applied research, machine learning, search, NLP, or related technical leadership roles. You have led senior individual contributors and/or managers in complex organizations.
- Demonstrated success delivering AI- or ML-powered customer experiences at scale.
- Deep expertise in at least two of the following areas:
- Conversational search, information retrieval, or relevance systems
- NLP, intent understanding, query reformulation, or LLM-based interaction development
- Recommendation systems, personalization, or shopping intelligence
- ML platform engineering, experimentation, model serving, or embedding infrastructure
- Strong technical credibility with the ability to direct architecture, assess tradeoffs, and affect implementation in high-scale production environments.
- Excellent executive communication and cross-functional leadership skills.
Preferred Qualifications- Holding an advanced academic degree (MS or PhD) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, Information Retrieval, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related specialty; or demonstrated equivalent experience recognized within the field.
- Experience shipping conversational AI, assistant, or agentic product experiences in consumer technology, ecommerce, or adjacent domains.
- Demonstrated success improving business outcomes through measurable gains in relevance, engagement, conversion, or customer happiness.
- Experience building internal capabilities or platforms as products, including self-service workflows, operational rigor, and reliability standards.
- Strong narrative and executive presence, with the ability to explain technical and scientific tradeoffs to diverse collaborator groups.
Location and Ways of WorkingThis role is based in San Jose, California. It will partner across globally distributed teams and collaborators, and requires strong cross-site operating rhythms to work effectively across North America, Europe, and Asia.
Periodic travel to key sites may be required for planning, leadership alignment, team development, and execution reviews.
Why This Role MattersThis is an opportunity to help define how the future of shopping works at eBay. You will build intelligent experiences that make discovery more natural, shopping more efficient, and decision-making more confident for millions of customers worldwide!
Additional DetailsThe base pay range for this position is expected in the range below:
$240,800 - $321,500
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.
