Director of Engineering, Machine Learning Recommendations

Etsy is a global marketplace for unique and creative goods that builds technologies connecting entrepreneurs and buyers. The Director of Engineering, Machine Learning will lead the Recommendations organization, owning its technical strategy and roadmap for personalized discovery across Etsy’s marketplace surfaces while guiding machine learning, retrieval, ranking, and recommendation systems teams.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• We prioritize candidates based within commutable distance of Etsy's Brooklyn Office
• Remote candidates outside commutable distance may be considered on a case-by-case basis, with the expectation of occasional travel to the office