Ebay Director Applied Research T28 

India, Karnataka, Bengaluru 

145100522

As Director, you will set the vision and lead the execution of a portfolio of high-impact research initiatives that blend applied science, scalable engineering, and domain expertise in commerce. You’ll be responsible for not only driving core innovation but also ensuring that cutting-edge models transition into production systems with measurable business impact.

eBay is an amazing company to work for. Being on the team, you can expect to benefit from:

• A competitive salary - including stock grants and a yearly bonus

• A healthy work culture that promotes business impact and at the same time highly values your personal well-being

• Being part of a force for good in this world - eBay truly cares about its employees, its customers, and the world’s population, and takes every opportunity to make this clearly apparent

​Job Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership & Vision

• Define and own the applied research strategy for the Product Knowledge Science group.

• Identify emerging research areas aligned with eBay’s business priorities, such as AI-driven taxonomy evolution, multimodal understanding (image + text), and dynamic knowledge graph enrichment.

• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to set research roadmaps and deliver measurable impact.

Team Building & Talent Development

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of applied scientists, machine learning engineers, and research managers.

• Foster a culture of innovation, scientific rigor, diversity, and technical excellence.

Technical Direction

• Oversee the design, development, and deployment of ML/AI systems related to entity resolution, attribute extraction, taxonomy generation, knowledge graph construction, and product normalization.

• Ensure best practices in experimentation, evaluation, and productionization of ML models.

• Promote open innovation by guiding contributions to conferences, patents, and open-source initiatives.

Cross-functional Influence

• Collaborate with partner teams to integrate applied research into end-user products.

• Influence senior stakeholders with data-driven recommendations and thought leadership.

• ​Present key technical and novel research work in public forums and conferences

Minimum Qualifications

• M.Sc. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or equivalent field with 12+ years of relevant industry experience, including 3+ years in people and project leadership roles

• ​Industrial experience with multiple of the following: ML architecture, deployment optimization, classification, regression, NLP, clustering, Deep Learning / Neural Networks, Reinforcement Learning, or related

• Experience managing cross-functional research or AI teams

• Ability to bridge long-term technology vision with short-term delivery goals

• Strong communicator with a track record of influencing senior leadership

Additional Qualifications

• ​5 or more related publications/patents in quality conferences or journals

• Open source tool building/commits to popular threads.

• Experience on Language models and KG building