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TCGplayer is seeking an exceptional Principal Engineer to define and drive our ML/AI technical strategy. This is a unique opportunity to shape how artificial intelligence and machine learning transform the trading card game marketplace experience for millions of collectors, players, and sellers.
As our most senior individual contributor in ML/AI, you'll bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI capabilities and practical marketplace applications. You'll work at the intersection of technical possibility and business impact, translating complex ML concepts and emerging generative AI technologies into strategic roadmaps while maintaining the technical depth to prototype and validate architectural decisions. Your scope encompasses both customer-facing innovations and internal productivity transformations, leveraging AI to accelerate our software development lifecycle and operational excellence.
Key Responsibilities
Define TCGplayer's multi-year ML/AI technical strategy, identifying transformative opportunities across both customer experiences and internal engineering productivity, with particular focus on practical applications of generative AI
Design the foundational AI/ML platform architecture that will scale from our current exploratory implementations to production systems serving millions of users, supporting both traditional ML models and LLM-based applications
Drive adoption of AI-powered development tools and processes, identifying opportunities to accelerate software delivery through code generation, automated testing, intelligent debugging, and documentation assistance
Design and implement AI-driven operational improvements, from intelligent monitoring and anomaly detection to automated incident response and capacity planning
Evaluate and prototype emerging AI technologies, particularly in generative AI and LLMs, building proof-of-concepts to validate feasibility and impact before broader investment
Partner with engineering, product, and data teams to translate business objectives into AI-powered capabilities, starting with intelligent site search and mobile deck-building experiences that may leverage both traditional ML and generative approaches
Establish AI/ML best practices, including model governance, ethical AI principles, performance benchmarking, prompt engineering standards, and operational excellence for both deterministic and generative systems
Serve as the technical authority on AI/ML across the organization, educating both leadership and business stakeholders on possibilities and limitations of both established ML techniques and emerging generative AI capabilities
Drive make-vs-buy-vs-partner decisions for AI infrastructure and capabilities, evaluating vendor solutions, foundation models, and APIs against custom development
Create technical platform specifications and architecture documents that enable other engineers to implement AI systems aligned with the overall strategy
Required Qualifications
10-12+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years specifically architecting and deploying ML/AI systems at scale
Demonstrated experience setting AI technical strategy and roadmaps in product-driven organizations, with recent focus on integrating generative AI capabilities
Deep understanding of the full ML lifecycle alongside practical experience with LLM deployment, fine-tuning, and prompt engineering
Proven ability to communicate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, from engineers to executives, with clarity and impact
Track record of evaluating emerging technologies and making pragmatic architectural decisions balancing innovation with delivery, particularly in the rapidly evolving generative AI space
Experience designing AI platforms that democratize both traditional ML and generative AI capabilities across engineering teams
Expertise in multiple AI domains (NLP, computer vision, recommendation systems) plus hands-on experience with transformer architectures, RAG systems, and production LLM deployments
Strong systems thinking with understanding of distributed systems, data pipelines, and production infrastructure for both traditional ML and token-based generative models
Preferred Qualifications
Experience in e-commerce marketplaces, particularly with search relevance, personalization, or fraud detection systems
Background in building AI applications for mobile platforms with real-time inference requirements, including on-device model deployment
Knowledge of tabletop gaming or collectibles domains, understanding unique challenges like card recognition, price prediction, or meta-game analysis
Production experience with RAG systems, semantic search, vector databases, and multi-modal generative AI applications
Demonstrated ability to evaluate and integrate foundation models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) into production systems
Experience with agent-based architectures and autonomous AI systems
Publications, patents, or conference presentations demonstrating thought leadership in applied AI
Additional Details
This job posting relates to an existing vacancy within eBay.
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