[Remote] Staff Product Manager, Recommendations and Discovery

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Babylist is the leading platform for expecting and new families, and they are seeking a Staff Product Manager to own personalization and discovery across Babylist's consumer experience. This role involves leading the development of ML-powered recommendations and shaping the company's approach to personalization.

Responsibilities

• Own recommendations and discovery at Babylist end-to-end. Strategy, KPIs, quality bar, impact, the hard tradeoffs. You are the person the rest of the company looks to when a question about discovery or recommendations has to get answered
• Set the one-year horizon for product personalization at Babylist. Articulate where we should be a year from now, defend the sequence of bets that gets us there, and update with conviction and speed when evidence demands
• Be a true peer to the ML EM. Set technical and product direction together. Help shape the modeling, data, and evaluation infrastructure that makes the next five years of work possible. Translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical direction the ML team can act on
• Set the quality bar for ML-powered experiences. Decide what 'good' looks like for a recommendation, and what unacceptable looks like. Make the hard tradeoffs
• Raise the whole company's judgment about ML investment. As the company’s definitive voice on ML and recommendations, you'll help leadership develop intuition for where ML compounds — what's table stakes, what's a real lever, and what to avoid. You will make the case for where ML matters and build belief that gets the right bets funded
• Operate as a AI-enabled builder. Use AI-native workflows in your own work. Stand up prototypes, run your own analyses, and ship things yourself when that's the fastest path to the right answer
• Mentor and develop the PMs around you. Help raise the bar for the function. Give specific, timely feedback that improves the team's output. Contribute to hiring as the org evolves

Skills

• Demonstrated product leader with meaningful time inside ML-powered consumer products
• Owned a recommendation, personalization, and/or discovery surface end-to-end at scale
• Held Senior PM, Staff PM, GPM, or comparable Lead roles
• Real B2C ML product depth
• Shipped recommendations, search, ranking, or personalization systems in a consumer-facing product
• Fluently speak about candidate generation vs. ranking, online vs. offline evaluation, cold start, exploration vs. exploitation, novelty effects, and the tradeoffs between business objectives and user-perceived relevance
• Understand the failure modes and the diligence required to ship ML responsibly
• Real technical fluency with ML systems
• Understand the full ML lifecycle — data pipelines, feature engineering, model training, deployment, monitoring, and iteration
• Comfortable reading a model design doc and pushing back on architectural choices
• A builder's instinct for early-stage ML
• Understand when a rule beats a model, when a model needs a guardrail, and when a hard-coded baseline is the right first step
• Strategic foresight
• Articulate the maturity curve of personalization and discovery at Babylist
• Deep customer expertise
• Talk to customers directly with regularity and bring concrete evidence (qualitative and quantitative) into every decision
• Commercial ownership
• Fluent in the business and understand how recommendations and feed surfaces drive registry completion, GMV, ad revenue, and retention
• Defend a unit economics model and partner with finance and data without needing them to translate
• Clarity of thought
• Communicate with extreme clarity that moves conversations forward fast
• AI-native daily practice
• Actively use LLMs and AI coding tools to prototype, analyze, query data, and move faster than you could without them
• Adaptability to change
• Select for change, not against it, and jump in where needed
• Background in e-commerce or marketplaces
• Experience helping build or scale an ML personalization function from scratch

Benefits

• Competitive salary with equity and bonus opportunities
• Company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Retirement savings plan with company matching and flexible spending accounts
• Generous paid parental leave and PTO
• Remote work stipend to set up your office
• Perks for physical, mental, and emotional health, parenting, childcare, and financial planning

Company Overview

Company H1B Sponsorship