Senior Director of Product Management for Ranking and Personalization - US - United States of America

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through our portfolio of iconic products. For advertisers, Yahoo Advertising offers omnichannel solutions and powerful data to engage with our brands and deliver r ...

Job description

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through our portfolio of iconic products. For advertisers, Yahoo Advertising offers omnichannel solutions and powerful data to engage with our brands and deliver results.

Role and Responsibilities

As the Senior Director of Product Management for Ranking and Personalization for Yahoo News and Homepage, you will lead the team building the algorithmic core that handles personalization and ranking for content and experiences across the Yahoo News & Homepage ecosystem.

Your mission is to develop a ranking core that utilizes machine learning to transform users into habitual visitors and serve core use cases related to content discovery and engagement while balancing business goals. This role demands a technically fluent and strategic leader who can lead the team to solve complex optimizations between multiple success metrics as well as a storyteller who can build trust and confidence across the organization.

Specifically, you will:

• 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.

Minimum Qualifications

• 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 Qualifications

• EST Timezone is highly preferred. If not located in EST will need to be open to travel up to 25% of the time and open to being flexible on hours to work with EST based team.

• 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).

The material job duties and responsibilities of this role include those listed above as well as adhering to Yahoo policies; exercising sound judgment; working effectively, safely and inclusively with others; exhibiting trustworthiness and meeting expectations; and safeguarding business operations and brand integrity.

At Yahoo, we offer flexible hybrid work options that our employees love While most roles don't require regular office attendance, you may occasionally be asked to attend in-person events or team sessions. You'll always get notice to make arrangements. Your recruiter will let you know if a specific job requires regular attendance at a Yahoo office or facility. If you have any questions about how this applies to the role, just ask the recruiter

Yahoo is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, and will not be discriminated against based on age, race, gender, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or any other protected category. Yahoo will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law. Yahoo is dedicated to providing an accessible environment for all candidates during the application process and for employees during their employment. If you need accessibility assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability, please submit a request via the Accommodation Request Form ) or call Requests and calls received for non-disability related issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.

We believe that a diverse and inclusive workplace strengthens Yahoo and deepens our relationships. When you support everyone to be their best selves, they spark discovery, innovation and creativity. Among other efforts, our 11 employee resource groups (ERGs) enhance a culture of belonging with programs, events and fellowship that help educate, support and create a workplace where all feel welcome.

The compensation for this position ranges from $172, $375,285.00/yr and will vary depending on factors such as your location, skills and experience.The compensation package may also include incentive compensation opportunities in the form of discretionary annual bonus or commissions, in addition to equity incentives. Our comprehensive benefits include healthcare, a great 401k, backup childcare, education stipends and much (much) more.

Currently work for Yahoo? Please apply on our internal career site.