Senior Staff Product Manager, User & Content Understanding

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,