Senior Applied Researcher - Search (m/f/d)

## About the team and the role: The Search Query Science team at eBay is a key driver of the company's search revenue and is growing rapidly. We're building a world-class team that values bold, innovative thinking and rewards impact. Our work focuses on solving core e-commerce search challenges—like query rewriting, annotation, classification, and recovery—using cutting-edge ML algorithms that interpret large-scale user behavior. With a fun, collaborative environment, we're now looking for stellar applied researchers to develop advanced query understanding products. If you're excited by large-scale query processing—intent detection, entity resolution, categorization, expansion and filter recommendation—join us and help redefine query understanding at eBay. ## What you will accomplish: - Tackle advanced AI challenges in Query Science and NLP at eBay. - Collaborate with researchers and engineers on cutting-edge technologies. - Contribute to solving complex problems that impact eBay's platform. - Help shape the technical vision for query understanding. - Apply software engineering best practices to improve development experience. - Build offline data pipelines for ML model training and validation. - Design and deploy web services for serving real-time inference algorithms. - Mentor junior colleagues and raise the technical bar within and outside your team. ## What you will bring: - A PhD in Computer Science/Engineering or related fields, and/or at least 8 years of experience in the field; - Proven track record of applied research and software development in the ML/NLP realm (e.g. publications in top-tier scientific venues, contributions to open-source software projects, etc.); - Strong education in computer science (data structures and algorithms, computational complexity analysis) and proficiency with multiple programming languages (Python/Java/Scala/C/C++/scripting languages); - Experience with service-oriented architectures and frameworks (e.g. SpringBoot), cloud computing solutions (Docker, Kubernetes, etc.), and databases; - Proven ability to work independently and make good decisions with minimal direction; - Strong communication skills (fluent English, both verbal and written).