Director of Product, Search & Recommendations
Job Description
San Francisco | California | United States
Upwork ($UPWK) is the world’s work marketplace. We help connect companies large and small with top independent talent from around the world. Simply put, our mission is to create economic opportunities so people have better lives.
Every year, more than $2 billion of work is done through Upwork by skilled independent professionals who want the freedom of working anytime, anywhere.
The Search & Recommendations team matches talent to opportunities and businesses to talent with the world’s most comprehensive understanding of what makes for successful work. This is powered by our knowledge graph, which goes beyond skills and past work experience; it has the potential to match people to the most personally and financially rewarding opportunities where they can get a leg up in their careers.
In this role, you’ll work closely with our ontology, data science, design, analyst, and engineering teams to build experiences that enable talent and hiring managers to easily express their capabilities and needs while also enabling teams throughout Upwork to further leverage the power of search and data science through personalization, recommendations, and experience design.
Your Responsibilities:
- Lead the implementation, metrics, and user experience for search and recommendations. This includes the core search experiences in Upwork’s marketplace for both hiring managers and talent, as well as a number of related experiences that further the selection of talent and job opportunities.
- Lead and develop your team of PMs in the art of product management and the science of highly performant, delightful search experiences.
- You’ll deeply understand and seek key trends in the broader landscape and the specific needs and mentalities of customers on both sides of the marketplace.
- Lead and partner with other product managers, designers, engineers, data scientists, analyst, ontologists, and product marketers to to execute cross-product and cross-functional initiatives.
- Drive proven results and new insights through continuous quantitative tests across the Upwork ecosystem.
What it takes to catch our eye:
- Experience hiring, developing, and leading highly performant search and recommendation teams
- Experience shipping high quality search and recommendation user experiences: You know how to build simple but effective experiences for complex products and/or data rich platforms
- A consistent track record of understanding customer needs and working across a variety of functional teams.
- Excellent communication skills: You have a strong executive presence for collaborating with customers, peers, colleagues, and executives. You can distill differing philosophies and approaches down to the essence and corral partners toward alignment. You can succinctly articulate goals, progress, and priorities in written, verbal, and presentation formats.
- Passion for Upwork and a deep appreciation of Upwork’s mission and impact.
- An understanding of ontology, taxonomy, and data models to hold your own during discussions with technical team members.
- An entrepreneurial spirit and creativity that translates to not just building great products and growing a strong team, but helping Upwork to be a stronger company and a better place to work.
Come change how the world works.
At Upwork, you’ll shape talent solutions for how the world works today. We are a remote-first organization working together to create exciting remote work opportunities for a global community of professionals. While we have physical offices in San Francisco and Chicago, currently we also support hiring of corporate full-time employees in 15 states in the United States. Please speak with a member of our recruitment team to determine whether you are located in a state in which we are hiring corporate full-time employees.
Our vibrant culture is built on shared values and our mission to create economic opportunities so that people have better lives. We foster amazing teams, put our community first, and have a bias toward action. We encourage everyone to bring their whole selves to work and grow together through development opportunities, mentorship, and employee resource groups. Oh yeah, we’ve also got amazing benefits.
Check out our Life at Upwork page to learn more about the employee experience.
Upwork is proudly committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse and inclusive workforce. As an Equal Opportunity Employer, we never discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical condition), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.
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