Senior Product Manager, Machine Learning - Ads

Etsy•New York, NY

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

We are looking for a Senior Product Manager to join Etsy Ads, our on-site advertising platform that helps sellers grow their businesses by connecting them with the right buyers at the right time. Etsy is home to millions of unique products, creating a uniquely complex challenge for sellers to connect with buyers through paid advertising opportunities shaped by budgets, competition, and timing. In this role, you will work on Etsy’s first-party ads product, where seller behavior and system behavior continuously influence each other through bidding, pacing, forecasting, and machine learning. These interactions create feedback loops that are difficult to predict and require careful measurement, hypothesis-driven iteration, and judgment to improve. This is a role for PMs who are comfortable operating in ambiguity and who make progress by forming clear hypotheses, testing assumptions, and learning quickly to inform their team’s decisions and direction. If you enjoy solving problems where the path forward isn’t always obvious and clarity comes from evidence and iteration rather than absolute certainty, this role could be a great fit. This is a full-time position reporting to the Director of Engineering. In addition to salary, you will also be eligible for an equity package, an annual performance bonus, and our competitive benefits that support you and your family as part of your total rewards package at Etsy. For this role, we are considering candidates based in the United States. Candidates living within commutable distance of Etsy’s Brooklyn Office Hub may be the first to be considered. For candidates within commutable distance, Etsy requires in-office attendance once or twice per week depending on your proximity to the office. Etsy offers different work modes to meet the variety of needs and preferences of our team. Learn more details about our work modes and workplace safety policies here. Etsy Ads is used by sellers of all sizes to grow their businesses and is one of Etsy’s major revenue streams. The Ads team works across buyer experience, seller tools, relevance, and core Ads systems, including ML-informed decisioning, pacing, forecasting, and marketplace infrastructure that directly shape Ads performance end-to-end. Product Managers at Etsy are full members of their teams, working side by side with engineers (full-stack and machine learning), applied scientists, and analysts to reason about system behavior, tradeoffs, and impact. PMs do not hand work over a wall; instead, they are in continuous conversation with their teams to explore problems, test ideas, and refine solutions together. The work is collaborative, iterative, and grounded in learning from real customer and system behavior.

Requirements

You have 5+ years of Product Management experience, ideally working on complex or ambiguous products.
You are skilled at identifying assumptions, forming hypotheses, and quickly validating them with data, experimentation, or qualitative insights.
You are comfortable making progress without perfect information and adapting your approach as you learn.
You have experience partnering closely with engineers and applied scientists to explore problems and shape solutions, rather than handing work off.
You are comfortable working with machine learning–informed systems, even if you are not writing models yourself, and can engage meaningfully in tradeoff discussions about performance, risk, and complexity.
You are comfortable reading and writing lightweight Python for analysis, experimentation, or interacting with internal tools, even if you are not building production systems.
You consistently use data and insights to decide what to test, what to build, and what to stop.
You are deeply customer-focused and connect customer needs to business outcomes, looking for solutions that create aligned value for sellers, buyers, and Etsy.
You are collaborative, team-oriented, and value shared ownership and diverse perspectives.
You communicate clearly with technical and non-technical audiences, including peers and senior stakeholders.
You are curious, reflective, and open to feedback as a core part of how you work.

Responsibilities

Lead product strategy and roadmap definition for key Ads problem spaces focused on helping sellers connect with buyers and grow their businesses.
Work closely with engineers (full-stack and machine learning), applied scientists, and analytics to break down ambiguous problems, surface assumptions, and reason about what needs to be learned to move forward.
Engage directly with data, experiments, and internal tools to understand model behavior, system performance, and the impact of changes across different seller cohorts.
Define clear hypotheses and success criteria, and partner with your team to validate them through experiments, analysis, and iteration.
Work closely with engineers and applied scientists to craft solutions that range from simple heuristics to machine learning–informed approaches, choosing the right level of complexity for the problem at hand.
Collaborate continuously with cross-functional partners to shape solutions, adjust direction based on new insights, and avoid over-investing in unproven ideas.
Translate complex system behavior and learnings into clear product decisions and tradeoffs.
Partner with teams across Etsy Ads to deliver cohesive, end-to-end solutions spanning buyer and seller experiences.
Contribute to team culture, health, and effectiveness by modeling curiosity, clarity of thinking, and strong collaboration.