Principal Product Manager – Personalization

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.

About

• Yahoo is a global media and tech company that connects people to their passions. We reach nearly 900M people around the world, bringing them closer to what they love—from finance and sports to shopping, gaming, and news—with the trusted products, content, and tech that fuel their day. For partners, we provide a full-stack platform for businesses to amplify growth and drive more meaningful connections across advertising, search, and media.

• Yahoo Mail is the ultimate consumer inbox with hundreds of millions of users. It’s the best way to access your email and stay organized from a computer, phone or tablet.  With its beautiful design and lightning fast speed, Yahoo Mail is embarking on the mission to create the best consumer-focused platform for running the “business of life”. 

About the Role

• The Mail Intelligence team is seeking a visionary and deeply technical Principal Product Manager – Personalization to architect and drive the next generation of AI-powered personalization capabilities in Yahoo Mail. This role will be at the helm of designing a best-in-class recommendation engine that deeply understands user intent, context, and identity—delivering intelligent, dynamic, and personally meaningful experiences that evolve with each user over time.

• You’ll lead the end-to-end strategy and execution for personalization across Mail—partnering closely with research scientists, ML engineers, data scientists, and experience teams. Your work will power real-time, multi-surface recommendations and unlock new engagement & business opportunities across Yahoo Mail’s consumer products.

Your Day-to-Day:

• Own the personalization product strategy for Yahoo Mail, aligning with Mail Intelligence’s technical vision and business impact goals.

• Drive the definition of a multi-layered personalization stack—identity, embeddings, retrieval, ranking—partnering with engineering, architecture, and research to build world-class recommendation systems that unlock user value while optimizing for performance and cost.

• Lead the development of privacy-aware, context-rich systems that adapt to user intent, language, device, and lifecycle.

• Define experimentation and evaluation frameworks, including A/B testing, model performance, and relevance metrics.

• Partner with product managers driving experience and growth, as well as design and UXR teams, to integrate personalization seamlessly into user-facing flows.

• Define and track KPIs around personalization lift, relevance, engagement, and downstream impact.

• Champion a culture of personalization excellence, keeping Yahoo Mail at the forefront of innovation and research.

What Are We Looking For?

• 8+ years of Product Management experience in AI/ML heavy domains—recommendation systems, personalization platforms, or search/ranking.

• Demonstrated success building and scaling real-time personalization engines or recommendation systems used by millions of users.

• Strong understanding of personalization techniques: Collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, hybrid models, deep learning-based approaches.

• Hands-on experience with ML lifecycle: Data acquisition, feature engineering, offline training, online inference, experimentation & evaluation. 

• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to synthesize technical detail and strategic vision across varied audiences.

• Passionate about user experience, with a sharp product sense and empathy for consumer needs.

• Proven ability to align research, engineering, and cross-functional teams toward bold and measurable goals.

Preferable Skills:

• Well grounded in statistics and user intent modeling.

• Familiarity with privacy-preserving personalization methods (e.g., on-device inference, federated learning, differential privacy).

• Experience scaling personalization for international and multilingual user bases.

• Exposure to real-time recommendation infrastructure and large-scale embedding systems.

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 (www.yahooinc.com/careers/contact-us.html) or call +1.866.772.3182. 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 $136,125.00 - $283,750.00/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. 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.