Principal Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Principal Engineer (AI): Define and drive multi-year ML/AI technical strategy for trading card game marketplace with an accent on generative AI applications, platform architecture, and operational improvements. Focus on designing scalable AI/ML systems, prototyping emerging technologies like LLMs, and establishing best practices for production deployments serving millions of users.

Location: Remote (Oregon, US)

Company

hirify.global, an eBay company, empowers millions of buyers and sellers in the trading card game marketplace across 190+ markets.

What you will do

• Define multi-year ML/AI strategy focusing on generative AI for customer experiences and internal productivity.
• Design foundational AI/ML platform architecture scaling to production for millions of users, supporting traditional ML and LLMs.
• Drive adoption of AI-powered development tools for code generation, testing, debugging, and documentation.
• Implement AI-driven operations like monitoring, anomaly detection, incident response, and capacity planning.
• Prototype emerging AI technologies, evaluate foundation models, and make make-vs-buy decisions.
• Partner with teams to build capabilities like intelligent search and mobile deck-building using ML and generative AI.

Requirements

• 10-12+ years software engineering, 5+ years architecting/deploying ML/AI at scale
• Experience setting AI strategy/roadmaps with generative AI integration
• Deep ML lifecycle knowledge, LLM deployment, fine-tuning, prompt engineering
• Expertise in NLP, computer vision, recommendations, transformers, RAG, production LLMs
• Systems thinking for distributed systems, data pipelines, AI infrastructure
• Strong communication of technical concepts to diverse audiences

Nice to have

• eCommerce experience with search, personalization, fraud detection
• Mobile AI apps with real-time inference, on-device deployment
• Tabletop gaming/collectibles knowledge
• RAG, semantic search, vector DBs, multi-modal AI
• Foundation models integration, agent-based architectures
• Publications/patents in applied AI

Culture & Benefits

• Bring your authentic self to work in an inclusive environment
• Full benefits including medical, 401(k), PTO, parental leave
• Target bonus and restricted stock units
• Focus on innovation, customer-centricity, and sustainability