Director, Agentic Shopping

eBay•San Jose, CA

12d•$240,800 - $321,500•Onsite

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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 engineering, experimentation, model serving, or embedding infrastructure
Strong technical credibility with the ability to direct architecture, assess tradeoffs, and affect implementation in high-scale production environments.
Excellent executive communication and cross-functional leadership skills.

Nice To Haves

Holding an advanced academic degree (MS or PhD) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, Information Retrieval, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related specialty; or demonstrated equivalent experience recognized within the field.
Experience shipping conversational AI, assistant, or agentic product experiences in consumer technology, ecommerce, or adjacent domains.
Demonstrated success improving business outcomes through measurable gains in relevance, engagement, conversion, or customer happiness.
Experience building internal capabilities or platforms as products, including self-service workflows, operational rigor, and reliability standards.
Strong narrative and executive presence, with the ability to explain technical and scientific tradeoffs to diverse collaborator groups.

Responsibilities

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