Hybrid Toronto — Staff Applied Researcher, Vision & Multimodal AI

eBay Inc.; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

eBay Inc. is seeking a Staff Applied Researcher to advance visual and multimodal AI across the Global Focus Categories. You will research, train, fine-tune, evaluate, and deploy foundation-model-based systems at scale, collaborating with product, engineering and analytics teams.

You will lead ambiguous problems, mentor researchers, and influence technical direction while shaping production-grade AI solutions for personalized experiences and marketplace understanding.

Qualifications

• Ph.D. or M.S. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, or a related technical field with a focus on computer vision, multimodal AI, or artificial intelligence
• PhD + 3 or more years of experience OR MS + 4 year of experience building computer vision and/or multimodal systems for large-scale applications
• Hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, evaluating, and deploying visual-language models or other modern foundation-model-based systems, including adapting these models to specialized applications and problem domains
• Demonstrated expertise in scalable machine learning infrastructure, distributed training, model serving, and production monitoring, with extensive experience leveraging PySpark, SQL, and Hadoop for large-scale data processing
• Strong proficiency in Python and modern machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow, with fluency in agentic coding and AI-assisted development workflows
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to influence senior cross-functional stakeholders and collaborate effectively across research, engineering, and product organizations

Responsibilities

• Develop and deploy visual and multimodal machine learning models for large-scale applications involving fine-grained recognition, visual understanding, content intelligence, retrieval, and decisioning
• Design and optimize end-to-end training and inference pipelines for modern AI systems, including orchestration of multiple models and services in production environments
• Advance core capabilities in classical and modern vision and multimodal problem spaces such as detection, segmentation, classification, metric and contrastive learning, and visual-language modelling
• Lead research initiatives focused on visual perception technologies and multimodal artificial intelligence
• Identify gaps in which existing models are insufficient
• Develop innovative strategies and adapt foundation models for specific domain problems
• Lead research and development in VLM training and fine-tuning, model distillation, reinforcement learning, and other components of the modern AI stack
• Partner closely with product managers, engineers, designers, and applied scientists to translate ambiguous business opportunities into robust technical roadmaps and delivered solutions
• Communicate technical direction, trade-offs, and results clearly to cross-functional stakeholders, including director-level leaders, to drive alignment and informed decision-making
• Mentor junior and senior team members, raise the technical bar for experimentation and production excellence, and contribute to a strong research and engineering culture

Skills

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Distributed training

SQL

Education

Ph.D. in CS/EE/ML or related field

M.S. in CS/ML + 4+ years experience

Tools

PySpark

Hadoop

Job description

eBay Inc. is seeking a Staff Applied Researcher to advance visual and multimodal AI across the Global Focus Categories. You will research, train, fine-tune, evaluate, and deploy foundation-model-based systems at scale, collaborating with product, engineering and analytics teams.

You will lead ambiguous problems, mentor researchers, and influence technical direction while shaping production-grade AI solutions for personalized experiences and marketplace understanding.