Sr. MTS Software Engineering - AIRI

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. Our customers are our compass, authenticity thrives, bold ideas are welcome, and everyone can bring their unique selves to work — every day. We're in this together, sustaining the future of our customers, our company, and our planet. Join a team of passionate thinkers, innovators, and dreamers — and help us connect people and build communities to create economic opportunity for all. 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.

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