Senior Applied Researcher

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Join a team of passionate thinkers innovators and dreamers and help us connect people and build communities to create economic opportunity for all.

About the team and the role:

The AI Systems Performance & Governance team at eBay AI Research and Innovation is looking for a highly qualified Senior Applied Researcher to join our team in Toronto.

In this role you will work at the intersection of applied research and AI governance for Generative AI systems (LLMs VLMs and agentic systems). You will focus on the science of evaluation monitoring and safety for GenAI applications while contributing to the development of AI sandbox environments evaluation frameworks and governance best practices.

You will help ensure that GenAI and agentic systems are scientifically grounded properly evaluated safe and production-ready across their full lifecycle.

What you will accomplish:

• Drive the fundamental science behind evaluation creating robust methodologies and metrics to accurately assess the performance safety and reliability of LLMs VLMs and agentic systems including offline metrics human evaluation and online experimentation.

• Define scientifically grounded metrics for complex GenAI systems including RAG pipelines and multi-agent workflows (e.g. hallucination grounding robustness agent reliability safety).

• Provide scientific leadership across complex and ambiguous GenAI initiatives by setting research direction reviewing evaluation and safety methodologies and driving alignment on technical standards across teams.

• Build and evolve AI Sandbox environments for safe experimentation benchmarking and validation of GenAI and agentic systems.

• Advance the science behind building content moderation and safety guardrails developing novel approaches for agentic safety steering to ensure autonomous and generative systems operate safely and ethically.

• Establish scientific best practices and anti-patterns for GenAI and agentic application development covering evaluation safety and system design.

• Partner with engineering and product teams to ensure evaluation safety and monitoring approaches are applied consistently in production systems.

• Translate Responsible AI requirements into measurable testable and scalable evaluation and safety solutions.

What you will bring:

• Masters degree or PhD in Computer Science Engineering Mathematics or a related field.

• Proven experience in machine learning with strong hands-on experience building at least one of the following: LLMs VLMs Conversational Search systems Agentic Systems or Content Moderation solutions.

• Proficiency in Python and frameworks such as PyTorch TensorFlow Langfuse LangGraph or similar.

• Solid understanding of machine learning algorithms model architectures training techniques and building performant inference pipelines. Experience with model inference optimization techniques and libraries is a plus.

• Experience with data preprocessing feature engineering model evaluation metrics and large-scale data processing frameworks such as Spark.

• Solid understanding of the ML lifecycle including experimentation validation and post-deployment monitoring.

• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills and the ability to work in a fast-paced dynamic environment.

• Demonstrated experience independently leading complex applied research initiatives from problem formulation through production adoption with evidence of influencing technical direction mentoring others and establishing methodologies or standards used beyond an individual project.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical collaborators propose creative solutions and support tracking and delivery within release plans.

• Publication record in top AI conferences or journals is a strong plus.

• Experience with AI safety LLM/VLM/agent guards content moderation and policy-driven GenAI evaluation is a strong plus.

What We Offer

• An opportunity to work on cutting-edge research in GenAI evaluation and monitoring making significant contributions to both the field and real-world applications.

• A collaborative and supportive work environment where innovation and creativity are encouraged.

• Access to state-of-the-art resources and tools to support your research and development work.

• A culture that values diversity inclusion and the professional growth of its members.

• Competitive compensation and benefits package tailored to attract the best talent in the field.

Additional Details

This job posting relates to an existing vacancy within eBay.

eBay is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion national origin sex sexual orientation gender identity and disability or other legally protected you have a need that requires accommodation please contact us at . We will make every effort to respond to your request for accommodation as soon as possible. View our accessibility statement to learn more about eBays commitment to ensuring digital accessibility.

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Required Experience:

Senior IC