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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)

San Jose, CA

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.

What You Will Own

• 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

What Makes This Role Distinct

• 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.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s 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

1. NLP, intent understanding, semantic parsing, or query reformulation

Large language model applications for search, assistance, or question answering

1. Ranking, retrieval, embeddings, or relevance optimization

• 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

Preferred Qualifications

• 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

Location and Ways of Working

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.

Why This Role Matters

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:

$217,600 - $290,500

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.

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 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 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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