Lead Engineer – AIRI

Lead Engineer – AI Research, Innovation

eBay is seeking a dedicated, highly skilled, and technically hands-on Lead Engineer to join our AIRI division. This is a great opportunity to help lead a highly visible and strategically important AI engineering team at one of the most established and heavily trafficked e‑commerce companies in the world.

As a Lead AI Engineer, you will work across the full AI lifecycle: from early experimentation and prototyping to the production deployment of reliable, scalable, and responsible AI systems that support millions of users. Your focus will include Generative AI systems, intelligent agents, conversational AI, and agent‑based architectures. You will help define and implement the technical roadmap for AI initiatives while ensuring engineering excellence across the team.

This role requires a strong balance of hands‑on technical depth and leadership ability. You will be expected to contribute directly to complex technical work while also guiding other Engineers, establishing guidelines, reviewing designs, and helping the team make sound technical decisions. Our systems handle billions of requests per day, use large‑scale GPU clusters, and power key intelligent experiences across the eBay platform.

• Lead the design, development, and optimization of scalable AI systems using Generative AI, LLMs, and agent‑based architectures.
• Provide technical leadership to a team of AI Engineers, helping guide architecture, implementation, delivery, and operational excellence.
• Lead the development of agent‑led user experiences, including systems that leverage task decomposition, memory, tool use, dynamic planning, and multi‑agent orchestration.
• Partner with Product, Research, Data Engineering, and Software Engineering teams to translate business and user needs into effective AI system designs.
• Drive architectural decisions for AI‑powered products and platforms, ensuring systems are reliable, maintainable, cost‑effective, and production‑ready.
• Mentor and coach Engineers through design reviews, code reviews, technical planning, and hands‑on problem solving.
• Help advance eBay’s internal platform for GenAI applications by contributing reusable components, APIs, frameworks, patterns, and engineering guidelines.
• Establish and promote guidelines for AI system evaluation, observability, model integration, experimentation, responsible AI, and production monitoring.
• Monitor and optimize AI systems in production for latency, quality, scalability, reliability, cost efficiency, and responsible AI use.
• Lead technical planning and execution for complex AI initiatives, helping the team break down ambiguous problems into clear engineering work.
• Stay ahead of the latest advances in AI, machine learning, LLMs, AI agents, retrieval‑augmented generation, and emerging tooling, and apply a practical lens when integrating new technologies into the product stack.
• Drive continuous improvement across design, implementation, evaluation, deployment, and operational processes based on experimentation, data, and team feedback.
• Influence technical strategy across teams and help align engineering efforts with broader organizational goals.

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, machine learning engineering, AI engineering, or related technical roles.
• 5+ years of focused experience developing, deploying, and operating AI‑centric or ML‑powered systems in production environments.
• 2+ years of experience leading technical initiatives, mentoring engineers, or providing technical direction to engineering teams.
• 2+ years building agent‑led systems, including LLM‑based agents, autonomous workflows, task‑planning systems, tool‑using agents, or multi‑agent orchestration.
• Proven success taking AI‑powered products from prototype to production, with a strong emphasis on maintainability, scalability, performance, reliability, and user impact.
• Strong hands‑on engineering skills, with the ability to contribute directly to complex system design and implementation.
• Strong programming skills in Java or similar JVM languages, with working proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch,…