Senior Applied Researcher - Search (m/f/d) - Forschung, Ingenieur

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).