About the position

Etsy is seeking a Senior Staff Product Manager, User & Content Understanding to lead the product strategy for understanding both buyers and the unique inventory on the platform. This senior individual-contributor role is within Etsy’s Machine Learning (ML) organization and involves setting the broader Understanding strategy by working directly with User and Content Understanding teams and partnering across Search, Recommendations, Ads, Buyer Experience, and ML Platform teams. The role focuses on two key areas: User Understanding, which involves developing richer representations of buyers' tastes, interests, preferences, missions, context, and intent to anticipate their future needs; and Content Understanding, which involves building a rich, multimodal understanding of Etsy’s items, shops, sellers, and content, including their attributes, aesthetics, quality, and appeal. These capabilities will enhance personalization, search, recommendations, discovery, advertising, and future shopping experiences on Etsy.

Responsibilities

• Define Etsy’s User & Content Understanding strategy
• Develop a multi-year product vision for how Etsy understands buyers, inventory, sellers, missions, and context.
• Identify foundational capabilities that can unlock improvements across multiple products and surfaces.
• Translate advances in representation learning, multimodal models, LLMs, sequence modeling, generative recommendation, and related fields into substantial product opportunities.
• Build a richer understanding of Etsy’s buyers, moving beyond interaction history toward deeper understanding of tastes, aesthetics, interests, preferences, and affinities.
• Help Etsy understand a buyer’s current mission and what may help them progress.
• Develop better approaches for new, signed-out, and low-history buyers using context, in-session behavior, graph and cohort signals, and other forms of inference.
• Deepen Etsy’s understanding of its inventory by establishing a strategy for richer semantic and multimodal representations of listings, shops, sellers, and other content.
• Improve Etsy’s understanding of objects, attributes, aesthetics, occasions, seasonality, price and value, quality, craftsmanship, originality, and human connection.
• Develop scalable approaches for understanding long-tail and newly listed inventory where behavioral signals are limited.
• Partner with Trust and Marketplace teams to make Etsy-specific dimensions like authenticity, authorship, quality, and differentiation usable within our ML systems.
• Align product leaders, engineers, scientists, analysts, researchers, and designers around shared strategies.
• Influence team roadmaps across the organization.
• Navigate trade-offs where the locally optimal solution for one surface may not be the best long-term solution for Etsy.
• Mentor PMs and raise the quality of ML product thinking across MARS.

Requirements

• Significant product management experience leading large, ambiguous problem spaces with meaningful customer and business impact.
• Deep experience with ML-powered consumer products; Search, Recommendations, Personalization, Ads, or Discovery experience is especially relevant.
• Understanding modern search and recommender systems well enough to engage deeply with Engineering and Applied Science on embeddings, retrieval and 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 platforms disconnected from real product needs.
• Consistent track record of influencing senior technical and product leaders without formal authority.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in the context of e-Commerce is a plus.

Benefits

• Equity package
• Annual performance bonus
• Competitive benefits that support you and your family