Senior Staff Product Manager, User & Content Understanding

Company Description
Etsy is the global marketplace for unique and creative goods. We build, power, and evolve the tools and technologies that connect millions of entrepreneurs with millions of buyers around the world. As an Etsy employee, you will tackle unique, meaningful, and large-scale problems alongside passionate coworkers, all the while making a rewarding impact and Keeping Commerce Human.

We believe exceptional companies are built by exceptional teams, and we're intentional about it. That means hiring great people, setting them up for success from day one, and giving them real reasons to grow their careers here. We invest in development that goes beyond promotions, and we foster the trust and relationships that help people do their best work together.

What’s the role?

Etsy is home to an extraordinary collection of items, sellers, styles, and ideas. Helping buyers navigate that complexity depends on two fundamental capabilities: understanding our buyers deeply, and understanding the unique inventory they come to Etsy to discover.

We’re looking for a Senior Staff Product Manager, User & Content Understanding to lead Etsy’s product strategy for both.

This is a senior individual-contributor role within Etsy’s Machine Learning (ML) organization. At the Senior Staff level, your scope extends well beyond any single squad. You’ll work directly with our User and Content Understanding teams and partner across Search, Recommendations, Ads, Buyer Experience, and ML Platform teams to set our broader Understanding strategy.

The role spans two deeply connected areas:

User Understanding: Developing richer representations of buyers—their tastes, interests, preferences, missions, context, and evolving intent—so Etsy can move beyond simply reflecting recent behavior toward genuinely understanding what someone may value and need next.

Content Understanding: Building a rich, multimodal understanding of Etsy’s items, shops, sellers, and content—what something is, what makes it distinctive, its attributes and aesthetics, its quality and originality, and who it may appeal to.

Together, these capabilities can power better personalization, search, recommendations, discovery, advertising, adaptive experiences, and future agentic shopping experiences across Etsy.

What’s this team like at Etsy?

The ML organization works on some of Etsy’s most important and technically exciting product problems: helping buyers find items they love across a marketplace of millions of highly varied goods. Our teams span Search, Recommendations, Ads, and foundational ML capabilities, partnering closely with the Buyer, Seller, and Marketplace Services organizations.

This role will be part of the Alliances and Understanding Initiative, which is focused on a blend of centralized ML capabilities, systems, and embedded / forward-deployed ML teams.

What does the day-to-day look like?

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

• Move buyer representations beyond interaction history toward deeper understanding of tastes, aesthetics, interests, preferences, and affinities.
• Help Etsy understand a buyer’s current mission: what they are trying to accomplish, how that mission is evolving, 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

• Establish 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.

Lead through influence

• 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 the Machine Learning Organization.

Of course, this is just a sample of the kinds of work this role will require! You should assume that your role will encompass other tasks, too, and that your job duties and responsibilities may change from time to time at Etsy's discretion, or otherwise applicable with local law.

Qualities that will help you thrive in this role are:

• 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. Experience in the context of e-Commerce is a plus.
• 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.
• Think at a systems level and can identify shared capabilities without building platforms disconnected from real product needs.
• Have a consistent track record of influencing senior technical and product leaders without formal authority.

Most importantly, you should be excited by a defining Etsy challenge: making a marketplace of millions of extraordinarily varied goods feel remarkably small, personal, relevant, and human to every buyer who visits.

Compensation & Benefits

In addition to salary, you'll be eligible for an equity package, an annual performance bonus, and our competitive benefits that support you and your family. Base salary is determined by your location, skills, and experience.

Etsy uses two geographic pay zones to reflect the labor markets where we compete for talent: one called Geo-1, covering the New York City metropolitan area, San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle metropolitan area, and one called Geo-2, covering all other U.S. locations. Salary ranges for this role vary by zone and are listed below.

Location

We prioritize candidates based within commutable distance of Etsy’s Brooklyn Office. Depending on proximity, we ask team members to come in once or twice per week. Remote candidates outside commutable distance may be considered on a case-by-case basis, with the expectation of occasional travel to the office. Learn more details about our work modes and workplace safety policies here.

Salary Range:

• Geo-1: 233,000.00 - 315,000.00 USD Annual
• Geo-2: 210,000.00 - 284,000.00 USD Annual



What's Next

If you're interested in joining the team at Etsy, please share your resume with us and feel free to include a cover letter if you'd like. As we hope you've seen already, Etsy is a place that values individuality and variety. We don't want you to be like everyone else -- we want you to be like you! So tell us what you're all about.

Our Promise

At Etsy, we believe that a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace furthers relevance, resilience, and longevity. We encourage people from all backgrounds, ages, abilities, and experiences to apply. Etsy is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, religion or creed, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth and related medical conditions), gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, citizenship or immigration status, marital or familial status, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, military or veteran status**, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law**. If, due to a disability, you need an accommodation during any part of the interview or hiring process, please let your recruiter know and we will work with you to meet your needs. While Etsy supports visa sponsorship, sponsorship opportunities may be limited to certain roles and skills.