Senior Staff Product Manager, User & Content Understanding

About the role

Etsy is seeking a Senior Staff Product Manager, User & Content Understanding to lead product strategy for both user and content understanding within the Machine Learning organization. This senior individual‑contributor role partners across Search, Recommendations, Ads, Buyer Experience, and ML Platform teams to set a broader understanding strategy that powers personalization, search, discovery, advertising, and future agentic shopping experiences.

Responsibilities

• Define Etsy’s User & Content Understanding strategy and develop a multi‑year product vision.
• Identify foundational capabilities that unlock improvements across multiple products and surfaces.
• Translate advances in representation learning, multimodal models, LLMs, sequence modeling, generative recommendation, and related fields into product opportunities.
• Build richer buyer representations that move beyond interaction history toward deeper understanding of tastes, aesthetics, interests, preferences, and affinities.
• Help Etsy understand a buyer’s current mission, its evolution, and how to support progress.
• Develop approaches for new, signed‑out, and low‑history buyers using context, in‑session behavior, graph and cohort signals, and other inference methods.
• Establish a strategy for richer semantic and multimodal representations of listings, shops, sellers, and other content.
• Improve understanding of objects, attributes, aesthetics, occasions, seasonality, price/value, quality, craftsmanship, originality, and human connection.
• Develop scalable methods for long‑tail and newly listed inventory where behavioral signals are limited.
• Partner with Trust and Marketplace teams to make Etsy‑specific dimensions (authenticity, authorship, quality, differentiation) usable within ML systems.
• Align product leaders, engineers, scientists, analysts, researchers, and designers around shared strategies.
• Influence team roadmaps across the organization and navigate trade‑offs between local and long‑term solutions.
• Mentor other product managers and raise the quality of ML product thinking across the organization.

Qualifications

• Significant product management experience leading large, ambiguous problem spaces with meaningful customer and business impact.
• Deep experience with ML‑powered consumer products; experience in Search, Recommendations, Personalization, Ads, or Discovery is especially relevant.
• Experience in e‑Commerce contexts is a plus.
• Strong understanding of modern search and recommender systems, including embeddings, retrieval, ranking, sequence models, multimodal systems, LLMs, cold‑start, exploration, and evaluation.
• High fluency in experimentation, analytics, and causal reasoning.
• Ability to think at a systems level and identify shared capabilities without building disconnected platforms.
• Proven track record of influencing senior technical and product leaders without formal authority.
• Passion for making a massive, varied marketplace feel small, personal, relevant, and human to every buyer.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary determined by location, skills, and experience; Geo‑1 (NYC, SF Bay Area, Seattle) $233,000 – $315,000 USD annual; Geo‑2 (all other U.S. locations) $210,000 – $284,000 USD annual.
• Eligibility for an equity package and an annual performance bonus.
• Competitive benefits supporting you and your family.

Location

We prioritize candidates within commutable distance of Etsy’s Brooklyn office, with an expectation to work on‑site once or twice per week. Remote candidates outside this area may be considered on a case‑by‑case basis, with occasional travel to the office required.