Director, Agentic Shopping

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. About the team and the role:   Join us as the Director, Agentic Shopping, and lead the charge in transforming the future of ecommerce! This role is pivotal in crafting intelligent shopping experiences that help customers discover, evaluate, and make confident decisions through AI-powered interactions. Located in San Jose, you will collaborate closely with product, design, and cross-functional executives to define strategy, drive execution, and build world-class shopping experiences.   What you will accomplish: Define and drive the applied research strategy for agentic shopping and conversational search at eBay Lead teams developing core 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 clear 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 downstream marketplace outcomes Guide architecture and technical tradeoffs across model choice, latency, reliability, cost, and trustworthiness in production systems Help define the operating model for scaling new conversational and agentic experiences from pilot programs into durable platform capabilities Develop a high-performing team culture grounded in technical excellence, inclusive leadership, and strong execution Leadership Proficiencies and Operating Principles: Customer-centric approach. You treat relevance and discovery as customer problems first, building systems that better understand intent and improve quality continuously. Platform thinking and leverage. You build reusable capabilities, infrastructure, and APIs that enable multiple teams to build on shared foundations rather than reinventing solutions independently. Data-informed execution at scale. You operate with rigor across the full lifecycle from hypothesis and offline validation through experimentation, rollout, monitoring, and iteration. Multi-year strategy with pragmatic sequencing. You can place thoughtful long-term bets while delivering near-term outcomes and maintaining operational excellence. Leader-of-leaders capability. You build organizations intentionally, develop senior talent, compose clarity in ambiguity, and scale culture across teams and geographies.

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or comparable hands-on experience. 12+ years of experience in applied research, machine learning, search, NLP, or related technical leadership roles. You have led senior individual contributors and/or managers in complex organizations. Demonstrated success delivering AI- or ML-powered customer experiences at scale. Deep expertise in at least two of the following areas:  Conversational search, information retrieval, or relevance systems NLP, intent understanding, query reformulation, or LLM-based interaction development Recommendation systems, personalization, or shopping intelligence ML platform