Senior Tech Staff: Applied NLP & Conversational Search

eBay; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 217,600 - 290,500; Full time

Job summary

eBay, a global ecommerce leader in San Jose, seeks a Senior Technical Staff Member, Applied Research to advance conversational search and NLQ features. You will bridge applied research with production systems, improving natural language understanding and customer experiences.

The role emphasizes hands-on implementation, prototyping, and close collaboration with engineering and product teams to deliver scalable NLP-driven search improvements.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in applied research, ML, NLP or related engineering roles.
• Strong hands-on experience shipping production-quality ML/NLP or search systems.
• Deep expertise in NLP, semantic parsing, intent understanding or query reformulation.

Responsibilities

• Build and productionize conversational search and NLQ solutions.
• Update search stack: query understanding, retrieval, ranking, response generation.
• Develop intent understanding, query rewriting and semantic retrieval methods.
• Collaborate with science and engineering teams to integrate data-informed approaches.
• Build NLQ solutions for natural shopping queries and relevant outcomes.
• Create offline/online evaluation frameworks for conversational quality and relevance.
• Contribute to model selection, experimentation and measurement.
• Engage in code reviews, build discussions and cross-team collaboration.

Skills

Applied ML

NLP

Search Systems

Production Deployment

Latency

Coding

Education

Bachelor's in CS

MS/PhD preferred

Job description

eBay, a global ecommerce leader in San Jose, seeks a Senior Technical Staff Member, Applied Research to advance conversational search and NLQ features. You will bridge applied research with production systems, improving natural language understanding and customer experiences.

The role emphasizes hands-on implementation, prototyping, and close collaboration with engineering and product teams to deliver scalable NLP-driven search improvements.