Sr. Director Applied Research & Innov.
On-siteToronto, Ontario, Canada
Job Summary
Define and execute eBay's Agentic AI strategy and roadmap while building and leading a team of engineers and scientists developing scalable multi-agent and autonomous AI systems. Partner across product, infrastructure, and research teams to translate innovation into production-grade AI capabilities, leading platform development for model training, orchestration, reasoning, and reinforcement learning workflows. Develop robust developer experiences including APIs, SDKs, and self-serve tools to enable agent creation and deployment. Represent eBay's AI strategy internally and externally to foster innovation and collaboration across global hubs. This role reports to the Chief AI Officer and requires a PhD in Applied Research or related fields with extensive expertise in AI/ML infrastructure and distributed systems.
Required Qualifications
- PhD in Applied Research, Machine Learning, or related technical field
- Extensive experience in AI, ML, and distributed systems
- Senior engineering leadership roles managing large-scale AI or infrastructure teams
- Proven expertise in multi-agent systems
- LLM-based orchestration
- Reinforcement learning
- NLP
- Semantic graphs
- Deep understanding of AI/ML infrastructure—training, inference, pipelines, and orchestration frameworks
- Experience building developer platforms with self-serve APIs, SDKs, and robust documentation
- Strong background in cloud and hybrid infrastructure
- GPU/TPU scaling
- Performance optimization
- Demonstrated ability to translate complex AI concepts into practical, high-impact solutions
- Proven leadership in hiring, developing, and scaling high-performing technical teams across global hubs
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with fine-tuning and deployment of large foundation models (LLMs, multimodal models)
- Track record of open-source contributions or publications in AI/ML or multi-agent systems
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