Director of Engineering, Etsy
Machine Learning Recommendations
$266-400k
+ Eligible for an equity package, an annual performance bonus. Salary dependent on location
More information about location
1-2 days a week in office (Brooklyn, NY)
eCommerce platform for handcrafted goods
Be an early applicant
eCommerce platform for handcrafted goods
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$266-400k
+ Eligible for an equity package, an annual performance bonus. Salary dependent on location
More information about location
1-2 days a week in office (Brooklyn, NY)
1001+ employees
Company mission
To keep human connection at the heart of commerce.
Role
Who you are
- Proven ability to lead and develop multi-disciplinary teams of ML engineers, applied scientists, and platform engineers, including managing managers and senior managers
- 10+ years of progressive experience in ML engineering, with demonstrated success shipping large-scale recommendation, retrieval, or ranking systems into production
- A track record of driving complex, cross-functional technical programs to completion — including navigating shared infrastructure decisions with partner teams in Search, Ads, or adjacent ML platforms
- Sharp instincts for balancing near-term product impact with mid-to-long-term research investment, and the ability to communicate that trade-off clearly to both engineering and product leadership
- Familiarity with large-scale ML infrastructure: distributed training (TensorFlow, PyTorch), feature stores, model serving, and online experimentation frameworks
What the job involves
- We are looking for a Director of Engineering, Machine Learning to lead Etsy's Recommendations, the team responsible for the algorithms and systems that power personalized onsite-discovery across our marketplace. This is a pivotal technical leadership role at the intersection of ML research, systems engineering, and product impact
- In this role, you will own the end-to-end technical strategy for how Etsy connects buyers with the right listings across the App Homefeed, Web Home, Shop Home, Listing pages, Cart, and Checkout pages
- You will lead a team of ML engineers, applied scientists, and system engineers organized across three areas: candidate retrieval, ranking, and recommendation systems
- You will drive the evolution of our models from state-of-the-art multi-interest retrieval and multi-task deep ranking to next-generation LLM-powered foresight recommendations and generative discovery experiences. The biggest unsolved challenge in front of this team is not just relevance — it is inspiration: helping buyers discover new ideas and start new shopping missions
- The Recommendations organization sits at the heart of Etsy's marketplace. We own over 60 recommendation modules across Etsy's surfaces, with our most impactful work powering the App Homefeed, Web Home, Shop Home, Listing pages, Cart, and Checkout pages
- Our ML stack spans the full recommendation pipeline. On retrieval, we build and evolve our multi-interest user-to-listing embedding model as well as a LLM-powered system that generates forward-looking shopping ideas based on buyer personas
- On ranking, we operate a multi-task deep ranking model jointly optimizing for clicks, favorites, ads-to-cart, and purchases. Underpinning all of this is ReactorRecs, our in-house serving and orchestration platform that composes retrieval, ranking, filtering, and experimentation across 200+ recommendation modules
- We believe in research grounded in real user impact. We run rigorous offline and online experiments, use LLM-based and human-in-the-loop evaluation, and hold ourselves to both engagement and discovery metrics
- Define and drive the multi-year product and technical roadmap for Recommendations ML, with particular focus on personalization, foresight, diversity, and content freshness — the four problems where we have the most room to grow
- Lead and grow a team of ML engineers, applied scientists, and platform engineers across retrieval, ranking, and systems sub-teams, each with its own engineering manager
- Partner closely with product, UX, and cross-functional ML teams (Search, Ads, Buyer Understanding, Content Understanding) to align on a coherent, end-to-end buyer experience and shared infrastructure investments
- Drive the architectural evolution from our current two-stage retrieval-and-ranking pipeline toward more generative and LLM-integrated recommendation architectures
- Set the technical bar for model development, experimentation, evaluation, and productionization — including our offline VQA and LLM-as-judge evaluation frameworks
- Champion a high-velocity experimentation culture: our Multi-Variant Dataset (MVD) framework allows parallel A/B tests across retrieval and ranking components, and you should know how to squeeze value out of every experiment
- Mentor and develop engineering talent at all levels, including Staff and Senior Staff engineers and the engineering managers who report to you
- Of course, this is just a sample of the kinds of work this role will require! You should assume that your role will encompass other tasks, too, and that your job duties and responsibilities may change from time to time at Etsy's discretion, or otherwise applicable with local law
Application process
- If you're interested in joining the team at Etsy, please share your resume with us and feel free to include a cover letter if you'd like
Our take
Created as an alternative to more corporate eCommerce sites, Etsy is a peer-to-peer (P2P) website where users buy and sell handmade crafts, vintage items, art and photography. The online marketplace works similarly to Amazon and eBay, only with an emphasis on unique items rather than mass-produced merchandise.
Since its IPO in 2015, it has managed to hold its own in an increasingly competitive eCommerce industry, including from Amazon's handmade section that launched in 2015. Further, by providing sellers with ownership over pricing and branding, the site is attractive for those wanting to set up a business on an established platform.
However, the seller-side of Etsy is not without problems. A hike in transaction fees and the introduction of mandatory marketing fees for artists with high turnovers created significant discontent amongst sellers. Despite this, Etsy continues to connect artists and consumers, attracting shoppers with its message of extraordinary, handmade and affordable products.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
8% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
May 2012
$40m
LATE VC
Aug 2010
$20m
SERIES E
Total funding: $91.7m
Company benefits
- Equity (offers vary by country)
- Performance bonuses
- Paid gender neutral parental leave
- Adoption and family planning
- Back-up care
- Volunteer time off
- Donation matching
- Employee resource groups
- Global virtual events
- Employer paid health benefits
- Fitness benefits
- Wellness programming
- Mental health benefits
- 401K matching/Pension contributions
Company HQ
Downtown Brooklyn, NY
Leadership
Josh Silverman
(CEO)Previously senior executive at eBay, CEO of Shopping.com, CEO of Skype and President of Consumer Products & Services at American Express.
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