Yahoo · 1 day ago
Senior Director of Product Management for Ranking and Personalization
United States
Full-time
Remote
Director/Executive
$173K/yr - $375K/yr
10+ years expYahoo is a global company that helps millions achieve their online goals through iconic products. They are seeking a Senior Director of Product Management for Ranking and Personalization to lead the development of algorithmic personalization and ranking for Yahoo News and Homepage, focusing on enhancing user engagement through machine learning strategies.
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Responsibilities
Lead Personalization of Yahoo News and Home products to reach and exceed customer expectations utilizing the full breadth of Yahoo’s ecosystem to deliver highly personalized and tailored experiences across Mobile and Web products
Systemic Growth and Conversion: Strategize and execute initiatives to convert new or occasional users into repeat Yahoo users by facilitating content discovery and a seamless, personalized content journey that leads to repeat engagement and session growth
Define the Algorithmic Vision: Define and champion the multi-year product strategy for core ranking, feed optimization, and personalized content discovery, ensuring alignment with Yahoo’s business objectives and editorial trust standards - partnering closely w/ engineering partners
Define and Own KPIs: Drive, own, and be accountable for critical engagement and monetization metrics that support the business and are impacted by personalization and ranking
Navigate multi-faceted goals: Establish and execute the strategy for balancing competing algorithmic goals, such as maximizing ad yield vs. improving user dwell time, or prioritizing commerce/affiliate content vs. core editorial news. You will collaborate with engineering partners to design and build ML models that can successfully blend these signals without sacrificing long-term user trust
Lead ideation and and validate hypotheses related to personalization strategies for our core user segments. This includes finding ways to balance editorial input and business goals
Cross-Organizational Leadership: Act as the primary technical product leader for the ranking systems, leading and influencing roadmap decisions across independent stakeholders including platform, revenue and other teams
Team Leadership: Manage and mentor product managers to maximize team impact and individual career growth
Advance Ranking Models: Partner heavily with engineering to define the product roadmap for core recommender systems, balancing simple optimization signals (like CTR) with complex, user-centric factors such as content diversity, topic freshness, source trustworthiness and reading depth
ML Ideation and Iteration: Partner directly with Data Science and Core Engineering to define requirements for feature engineering, embedding strategies, and online experimentation frameworks to continuously refine and deploy production ML models at scale
Trust and Quality Guardrails: Define and scope product features and algorithmic guardrails to actively manage and reduce negative user experiences like repetitive or stale content and filter bubbles, fostering a culture of algorithmic explainability and fairness
Qualification
Required
10+ years of product management experience, with at least 5 years focused exclusively on Machine Learning, Ranking, or Core Feed Algorithms in a high-scale consumer internet or media environment
Deeply familiar with modern ML powered ranking algorithms w/ proven success in developing effective ranking strategies that serve user engagement and business goals
Experience scaling consumer products through algorithmic innovation, directly contributing to demonstrable lifts in key retention and engagement metrics (e.g., DV28, WAU/DAU)
Executive-Level influence and Stakeholder Management: Demonstrated ability to lead complex, cross-functional initiatives and effectively influence outcomes across organizational boundaries (e.g., Ad Tech, Commerce, Editorial) where your team may not have direct authority
Prior experience leading and mentoring a team of product managers focused on technical or platform areas
Exceptional communication skills to articulate complex technical trade-offs and define a compelling product narrative for technical, editorial, and executive audiences
Preferred
Thought Leadership & Innovation: A recognized thought leader in the product or recommendations product space with a history of pushing teams beyond incremental gains to embrace creative, 'out-of-the-box' ideas for ranking, such as using multi-objective optimization for user lifetime value or applying reinforcement learning to discovery
Experience in a major content aggregation, news, or social media platform with hundreds of millions of daily active users
A strong background in information retrieval, NLP, or leveraging Generative AI for content summarization, topic modeling, or user intent prediction
Technical Fluency in Goal Balancing: Practical experience defining objective functions and designing ML systems that successfully trade-off competing goals (e.g., LTV vs. Short-Term Revenue, or Trust vs. Click-Through Rate)
Benefits
Healthcare
401k
Backup childcare
Education stipends
Company
Yahoo
Yahoo is a technology and media company that serves users through its portfolio of digital platforms, products, and services. It is a sub-organization of Verizon Media.
5001-10000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Yahoo has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2023 (197)
2022 (646)
2021 (381)
2020 (463)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$6.8MKey Investors
SoftBank GroupSequoia Capital
2021-05-03Acquired
1996-04-12IPO
1995-11-30Series B· $4.8M
Leadership Team
Monica Vorn Mijaleski
Chief Financial Officer
Mike Gupta
SVP Finance / Chief Treasury Officer
Recent News
MIT Technology Review
2026-01-11
2025-12-27
Company data provided by crunchbase