This role pays more than
70%
of similar roles. Most pay
$204,887–$286,350
— the shaded band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$281k
versus about
$246k
for comparable roles.
Based on 240 similar postings.
Employer
About eBay
eBay is a global e-commerce company that operates an online marketplace connecting buyers and sellers for a wide range of new and used goods.
eBay currently has
28 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$188,800–$227,500
across 27 roles with salary data.
As Director, Agentic Shopping, you will lead a team focused on transforming ecommerce by creating intelligent shopping experiences that help customers discover, evaluate, and make confident decisions through AI-powered interactions. You will define the applied research strategy for agentic shopping and conversational search while leading teams to develop core capabilities such as shopping intent understanding, conversational retrieval, response generation, ranking optimization, and evaluation. Your daily work involves partnering with product and engineering leaders to turn emerging AI capabilities into customer-facing features, managing technical tradeoffs regarding model choice, latency, and reliability. You will utilize expertise in NLP, information retrieval, recommendation systems, and machine learning platform engineering to build scalable infrastructure. The role addresses the challenge of making discovery more natural and shopping more efficient for users navigating complex inventory and multi-turn conversational interactions.
Define and drive the applied research strategy for agentic shopping and conversational search.
Lead teams developing core capabilities like intent understanding, retrieval, response generation, and ranking optimization.
Translate emerging AI capabilities into customer-facing products with measurable business value.
Build systems to improve how buyers explore inventory, compare options, and make confident decisions.
Establish experimentation and measurement frameworks for conversational quality, relevance, and marketplace outcomes.
Guide technical architecture and trade-offs regarding model choice, latency, reliability, and cost.
Define the operating model for scaling pilot programs into durable platform capabilities.
Build and lead a high-performing team culture grounded in technical excellence and inclusive leadership.
What we're looking for
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or comparable hands-on experience.
12+ years of experience in applied research, machine learning, search, NLP, or related technical leadership roles.
Experience leading senior individual contributors and/or managers in complex organizations.
Demonstrated success delivering AI- or ML-powered customer experiences at scale.
Deep expertise in at least two areas: conversational search, information retrieval, NLP, recommendation systems, or ML platform engineering.
Strong technical credibility to direct architecture and assess tradeoffs in high-scale production environments.
Excellent executive communication and cross-functional leadership skills.
Advanced academic degree (MS or PhD) in a related field; experience shipping conversational AI or agentic products; and experience building internal platforms (preferred).
LLMs
Agent Frameworks
RAG
Vector Databases
Python
Prompt Engineering
Machine Learning
Deep Learning
Cloud-native Development
APIs
Data Science
Statistical Analysis
Time Series Analysis
Data Visualization
Observability