Applied Researcher 3 at eBay in Toronto, ON

Job description

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. Hybrid role, requires you to be in our Toronto office 3 days About the role and the team In the role of Applied Researcher 3 within the Global Focus Categories Applied Science team, you will develop new computer vision and multimodal AI solutions. These solutions will address complex problems across eBay’s global marketplace. Our team focuses on challenges where current models and off-the-shelf methods fall short. We adapt and extend groundbreaking foundation models to solve specialized, domain-specific problems at scale. The team works at the intersection of applied research, visual and multimodal intelligence, and large-scale machine learning systems. You will work across a continually evolving portfolio of projects and problem domains rather than specializing in a single application area. Work has spanned personalized experiences and recommendations, content intelligence and attribute extraction, fine-grained visual recognition, anomaly detection, and multimodal understanding of marketplace inventory. Each problem brings different data, modeling, and system challenges, creating opportunities to explore new approaches and develop capabilities where established solutions fall short. As an Applied Researcher 3, you will take problems from early investigation to production. You will research, build, train, fine-tune, evaluate, and deploy models and AI systems at scale. Collaborate with modern vision and multimodal foundation models. Develop specialized architectures, training approaches, data strategies, evaluation methods, and supporting systems to adapt them for challenging real-world applications. As a Senior Researcher on the team, you will help shape technical direction and identify new opportunities for applied research, lead ambiguous problems from initial investigation through production impact, influence senior technical and product stakeholders, and mentor researchers across the team. What you will accomplish Develop and deploy visual and multimodal machine learning models for large-scale applications involving fine-grained recognition, visual understanding, content intelligence, retrieval, and decisioning Design and optimize end-to-end training and inference pipelines for modern AI systems, including orchestration of multiple models and services in production environments Advance core capabilities in classical and modern vision and multimodal problem spaces such as detection, segmentation, classification, metric and contrastive learning, and visual-language modelin Lead research initiatives focused on visual perception technologies and multimodal artificial intelligence. Identify gaps in which existing models are insufficient Develop innovative strategies and adapt foundation models for specific domain problems Lead research and development in VLM training and fine-tuning, model distillation, reinforcement learning, and other components of the modern AI stack Partner closely with product managers, engineers, designers, and applied scientists to translate ambiguous business opportunities into robust technical roadmaps and delivered solutions Communicate technical direction, trade-offs, and results clearly to cross-functional stakeholders, including director-level leaders, to drive alignment and informed decision-making Mentor junio