Applied Researcher 1 - Multimodal AI

eBay is a global ecommerce platform that connects buyers and sellers and creates economic opportunity. The Applied Researcher 1 will develop and deploy computer vision and multimodal machine learning models for large-scale applications, while contributing to research, experimentation, evaluation, and productionization. The role also involves building AI pipelines and collaborating with product, engineering, design, and research teams.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and deploy computer vision or multimodal machine learning models for production applications across search, recommendations, content generation, and video
• Contribute across key stages of research and applied ML projects, from problem framing and data preparation through experimentation, evaluation, implementation, and productionization
• Build and improve training, inference, and evaluation pipelines for modern AI systems, including workflows that orchestrate multiple models and services
• Apply strong experimental methodology and scientific rigor to model development, including metric design, offline and online evaluation, error analysis, and ablation studies
• Contribute to core capabilities in classical and modern vision or multimodal problem spaces such as detection, segmentation, classification, contrastive learning, visual-language modeling, and multimodal retrieval
• Build and improve agentic or VLM-powered pipelines that combine foundation models, retrieval, tools, and business logic to deliver scalable user and seller experiences
• Partner with product managers, engineers, designers, and researchers to translate business opportunities into practical ML solutions
• Communicate progress, technical trade-offs, and results clearly to cross-functional stakeholders