Director, AI-Driven Agentic Shopping

Ebay; California; On-site; USD 241,000 - 322,000; Full time

Job summary

eBay is seeking a Director, Agentic Shopping in San Jose, CA, to lead applied research and build AI‑driven shopping experiences. You will guide teams across intent understanding, retrieval, and generation, partnering with product and engineering to deliver customer value at scale.

You will shape the operating model for scalable conversational capabilities and foster a culture of technical excellence and inclusive leadership.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field, or comparable hands‑on experience.
• 12+ years of experience in applied research, ML, NLP, or related technical leadership roles.
• Demonstrated success delivering AI‑ or ML‑powered customer experiences at scale.
• Deep expertise in two of: conversational search, information retrieval, NLP, recommendation systems, ML platform engineering.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the applied research strategy for agentic shopping and conversational search at eBay.
• Lead teams developing 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 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 marketplace outcomes.
• Guide architecture and tradeoffs across model choice, latency, cost, and trustworthiness in production systems.
• Help define the operating model for scaling new conversational experiences from pilots into durable platform capabilities.
• Develop a high‑performing team culture grounded in technical excellence and inclusive leadership.

Skills

Executive communication

Cross-functional leadership

AI/ML leadership

Product strategy alignment

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or engineering

MS or PhD preferred

Job description

eBay is seeking a Director, Agentic Shopping in San Jose, CA, to lead applied research and build AI‑driven shopping experiences. You will guide teams across intent understanding, retrieval, and generation, partnering with product and engineering to deliver customer value at scale.

You will shape the operating model for scalable conversational capabilities and foster a culture of technical excellence and inclusive leadership.