Lead Product Manager, Recommendations

About the role

Scribd, Inc. is seeking a Lead Product Manager, Recommendations to drive the future of content discovery for our 200 million monthly visitors. This role will focus on developing and implementing strategies to enhance user experience through personalized content recommendations.

Responsibilities

• Chart the long-term recommendations strategy - Own a multi-year roadmap spanning candidate generation, ranking, and results presentation across Scribd's surfaces, guiding every user from interest to the right document.
• Partner with ML Engineering & Applied Research - Translate cutting-edge retrieval and ranking research into production systems that blend collaborative signals, content embeddings, and real-time behavioral data for best-in-class personalization.
• Define the metrics that matter - Establish and monitor leading indicators of recommendations success: engagement rate, click-through, content completion, and downstream subscription conversion and retention.
• Balance short-term wins with long-term vision - Ship incremental relevance improvements that hit revenue goals while building an extensible recommendations platform aligned with Scribd's 3-year AI strategy.
• Fuse data with the voice of the customer - Synthesize experiment results, behavioral analytics, user interviews, and feedback to inform prioritization and feature design.
• Communicate with clarity and influence - Align product, engineering, design, content, and executive stakeholders by clearly articulating requirements, timelines, deliverables, and expected impact.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of product management experience, including 4+ years leading recommendations or search products in a high-traffic consumer environment.
• Deep familiarity with retrieval and ranking algorithms, embeddings, and feature stores — paired with the ability to reason about end-to-end customer journeys for distinct user segments.
• Track record of thriving amid ambiguity: shaping a multi-year vision, aligning cross-functional teams, and delivering incremental wins along the way.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills — adept at crafting product briefs and presenting data-backed decisions to senior leadership.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).

Bonus Points

• Hands-on proficiency with AI tools for productivity and analytics — including LLM-powered workflows, SQL copilots, and data exploration tools — to move fast, prototype ideas, and pressure-test assumptions without always needing engineering support.
• Experience designing LLM- and GenAI-enhanced discovery experiences that go beyond raw recommendations to deliver personalized, task-specific value.
• Familiarity with modern ML ops tooling.

Pay and Benefits

The salary range for this position is between $151,000 to $244,000, depending on location. Benefits include Scribd Flex (flexible work model), comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage, mental health support and disability coverage, generous paid time off, retirement matching and employee equity, learning and development programs, and more.