Sr. MTS Software Engineering - AIRI

eBay; Toronto; On-site; CAD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

eBay is seeking a Senior Staff AI Engineer to shape, build, and scale AI systems across our ecommerce platform. You will lead hands‑on architecture, guide evaluation and deployment, and influence multiple teams while maintaining production readiness and safety.

The role emphasizes GenAI, LLM‑powered applications, and strong technical leadership without direct reports. You will partner with Product, Research, Data Engineering, Platform, and Software Engineering teams to translate business needs

Qualifications

• Proven experience designing and delivering production AI systems at scale.
• Strong architectural judgment with cross‑team influence and reviews.
• Hands‑on execution plus mentorship and technical leadership.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture, design, and optimization of scalable AI systems.
• Serve as technical owner for high‑impact AI initiatives across services.
• Design agent‑led experiences and backend systems with memory and tools.
• Translate business needs into technical strategies, roadmaps, and risks.
• Drive production‑ready AI platforms with observability and cost control.
• Contribute to model integration, data pipelines, and APIs.
• Mentor engineers and participate in design/code reviews.
• Advance eBay’s GenAI platform with reusable components and standards.
• Define evaluation practices and monitor AI systems for safety and quality.

Skills

Generative AI

LLMs

Architecture design

Hands-on engineering

Mentorship

Tools

Python

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Kubernetes

Job description

At eBay, we're more than a global ecommerce leader — we’re changing the way the world shops and sells. Our platform empowers millions of buyers and sellers in more than 190 markets around the world. We’re committed to pushing boundaries and leaving our mark as we reinvent the future of ecommerce for enthusiasts.

Senior Staff Engineer – AI Research, Innovation

eBay is seeking a dedicated, highly skilled, and technically hands‑on Senior Staff Engineer, to join our AI Research and Innovation division. This is a high-impact individual contributor role focused on shaping, building, and scaling advanced AI systems at one of the world’s most established and heavily trafficked ecommerce platforms.

In this role, you will serve as a senior technical leader, hands‑on architect, and individual contributor for strategic AI initiatives. You will guide the design, development, evaluation, deployment, and operation of production AI systems that power intelligent experiences across eBay.

This is not a people‑management role. You will not be responsible for direct reports, performance management, or administrative team leadership. However, you will be expected to provide strong technical leadership through architecture, design reviews, code reviews, mentorship, technical strategy, cross‑team influence, and hands‑on execution.

You will partner closely with Product, Research, Data Engineering, Platform Engineering, and Software Engineering teams to translate ambiguous business and user needs into reliable, scalable, responsible, and production‑ready AI systems.

About The Role

As a Senior Staff AI Engineer, you will work across the full AI lifecycle: early exploration, rapid prototyping, system design, model and agent integration, evaluation, experimentation, production deployment, observability, and continuous improvement.

Your focus will include Generative AI systems, LLM‑powered applications, intelligent agents, conversational AI, retrieval‑augmented generation, agentic workflows, and multi‑agent architectures. You will help define the technical direction for key AI initiatives while directly working to sophisticated engineering work.

This role requires deep hands‑on engineering ability, strong architectural judgment, AI systems expertise, and the ability to lead through influence rather than formal authority. You should be comfortable operating in ambiguous problem spaces, making pragmatic tradeoffs, influencing senior partners, and helping teams turn ambitious AI ideas into durable production systems.

Our systems operate at large ecommerce scale, serve high‑volume real‑world user traffic, and power critical intelligent experiences across the eBay platform.

What You Will Accomplish

• Lead the architecture, design, development, and optimization of scalable AI systems using Generative AI, LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, and agent-based architectures.
• Serve as the technical owner or technical lead for high-impact AI initiatives that span multiple services, systems, teams, or product surfaces.
• Design and build agent‑led user experiences and backend systems that leverage task decomposition, memory, tool use, dynamic planning, retrieval, workflow orchestration, and multi‑agent coordination.
• Translate ambiguous business, research, and product opportunities into clear technical strategies, architecture proposals, implementation plans, milestones, risks, and tradeoffs.
• Drive architectural decisions for AI‑powered products and platforms, ensuring systems are reliable, maintainable, scalable, cost‑effective, observable, and production‑ready.
• Contribute directly to complex implementation work across backend services, AI orchestration layers, model integration systems, evaluation frameworks, APIs, data pipelines, and observability tooling.
• Partner with Product, Research, Data Engineering, Platform Engineering, and Software Engineering teams to align AI system design with user needs, business goals, platform capabilities, and operational constraints.
• Establish and promote technical standards for AI system design, agent architecture, LLM integration, evaluation, experimentation, responsible AI, production monitoring, and operational excellence.
• Lead design reviews, architecture reviews, code reviews, technical planning sessions, and production‑readiness reviews for complex AI systems.
• Mentor and guide engineers through technical problem solving, design feedback, implementation support, code quality improvements, and knowledge sharing.
• Help advance eBay’s internal GenAI platform by contributing reusable components, APIs, frameworks, reference architectures, evaluation patterns, engineering guidelines, and shared services.
• Define and improve AI evaluation practices, including offline evaluation, online experimentation, regression testing, model behavior analysis, quality measurement, human feedback loops, and production feedback mechanisms.
• Monitor and optimize AI systems in production for latency, quality, scalability, reliability, availability, cost efficiency, safety, and responsible AI use.
• Identify technical risks early and drive practical mitigation plans across architecture, implementation, launch, and operations.
• Influence technical strategy across teams by aligning engineering decisions with broader organizational goals, platform direction, and long‑term scalability.
• Stay ahead of advances in AI, LLMs, machine learning engineering, AI agents, retrieval systems, model serving, evaluation tooling, and emerging developer frameworks, applying a pragmatic lens to production adoption.
• Drive continuous improvement across design, implementation, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, incident response