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 for customer experiences and internal productivity. Focus on designing scalable AI/ML platforms, prototyping LLMs and emerging technologies, and establishing best practices for production deployments.

Location: Remote or Hybrid in Canada

Company

hirify.global, an eBay company, empowers millions of collectors, players, and sellers in the trading card game marketplace.

What you will do

• Define multi-year ML/AI strategy focusing on generative AI for customer experiences and engineering 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 like code generation, automated testing, and intelligent debugging.
• Implement AI-driven operational improvements including monitoring, anomaly detection, and capacity planning.
• Prototype emerging AI technologies, evaluate foundation models, and make make-vs-buy decisions.
• Partner with teams to build AI capabilities like intelligent search and mobile deck-building experiences.
• Establish best practices for model governance, ethical AI, and operational excellence.

Requirements

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

Nice to have

• Experience in e-commerce search, personalization, fraud detection.
• AI for mobile with real-time inference, on-device deployment.
• Knowledge of tabletop gaming, card recognition, price prediction.
• Production RAG, semantic search, vector databases, multi-modal AI.
• Foundation models integration, agent-based architectures.
• Publications or patents in applied AI.

Culture & Benefits

• Bring your authentic self to work in an inclusive environment.
• Work with passionate innovators pushing ecommerce boundaries.
• Remote or hybrid options available.
• Equal opportunity employer with accommodations for needs.