Director of Product, Search & Discovery (Scribd.com)

Director, Product Discovery (Scribd.com)

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About The Company

At Scribd (pronounced “scribbed”), our mission is to spark human curiosity. We create a world of stories and knowledge, democratize the exchange of ideas and information, and empower collective expertise through our four products: Everand, Scribd, Slideshare, and Fable.

We support a culture where employees can be real and bold; where we debate, commit, and embrace plot twists; and where every employee is empowered to take action as we prioritize the customer. We balance individual flexibility with community connections through our flexible work benefit, Scribd Flex, which allows employees to choose the daily work style best suited to their needs while ensuring intentional in‑person moments for collaboration, culture, and connection.

About The Team And Role

We are building a new Discovery product organization at Scribd.com, and this role is the founding Director of Product for that group. You will lead the strategy and execution across recommendations, search, ranking, and discovery experiences, and define how we evolve from traditional search and recs into a real‑time, LLM‑augmented discovery system that understands user intent, reasons across our corpus, and returns trustworthy, explainable results.

This is both a strategic and operational leadership role: you will manage and mentor PM leaders, partner with Engineering, Machine Learning, Applied Research, Design, Content, and Data Science, and establish the discovery roadmap that will shape Scribd.com’s long‑term engagement, retention, and subscription growth.

About You

You are a product leader who lives at the intersection of user problems, ML systems, and business outcomes. You have built or led teams that own discovery, personalization, or search at meaningful scale, and you are comfortable shaping long‑term vision while shipping iterative value along the way. You can talk embeddings and LLM architectures with engineers, and frame strategy for executives in terms of learner outcomes and subscription value. You are excited by the challenge of turning a massive UGC corpus into a trusted, intelligent learning companion.

You Will

• Set the multi‑year Discovery strategy.
• Define and drive the long‑term vision for Scribd’s discovery ecosystem, including recommendations, search, ranking, and semantic content understanding.
• Articulate how we move from document‑level retrieval to knowledge‑level discovery using foundational models and LLMs.
• Align this vision with company priorities in engagement, retention, and subscription growth, balancing foundational ML investments with high‑impact product improvements.
• Serve as the founding product leader for the Discovery group, managing, mentoring, and inspiring a team of product managers across discovery surfaces and platforms.
• Recruit and develop top PM talent, set a high bar for product craft, and build a culture that combines deep technical curiosity with strong user empathy.
• Establish durable cross‑functional operating rhythms with Engineering, ML, Data Science, Design, Content, and Trust & Safety.
• Oversee the evolution of Scribd’s personalization and retrieval stack, combining semantic embeddings, behavioral signals, hybrid retrieval, and LLM‑powered reasoning.
• Partner with ML Engineering and Applied Research to design and ship real‑time systems for retrieval, ranking, and evaluation that operate at global scale and under tight latency budgets.
• Lead the development of generative recommendation experiences that help users understand why content is relevant and what they might learn from it.
• Drive real‑time intent modeling and personalization that react to user behavior within and across sessions.
• Own end‑to‑end discovery journeys, from homepage and feeds to search results and document detail pages, ensuring users confidently find the right content quickly.
• Introduce AI overviews and conversational, question‑aware interfaces that help users ask richer questions and receive synthesized, sourced answers grounded in our corpus.
• Define the metrics that matter for long‑term subscription value, discovery satisfaction, and content health across Scribd.com.
• Lead a robust experimentation agenda with clear hypotheses, guardrails, and data‑driven decision making across discovery surfaces.
• Ensure that LLM and ML‑driven features ship with clear hypotheses, guardrails, and monitoring, including trust, safety, and quality considerations.
• Develop executive‑level narratives that articulate strategy, roadmap, progress, and impact for the Discovery organization.
• Build trusted, collaborative partnerships across global teams, and guide multi‑quarter and multi‑year roadmaps across time zones and functional groups.
• Communicate trade‑offs and decisions clearly to partners at every level, from engineers and researchers to executive leadership.

You Have

• 10+ years of product management experience, including 5+ years managing PM teams or leading multi‑disciplinary product groups.
• Demonstrated success owning discovery, personalization, search, or ranking experiences at scale in a consumer technology environment.
• Deep technical fluency in modern ML and AI systems, including retrieval and ranking, semantic embeddings, LLMs, retrieval‑augmented generation, feature stores, model evaluation, and real‑time personalization.
• A strong track record of translating user needs, data insights, and competitive trends into breakthrough discovery features, ideally including ML or LLM‑powered experiences.
• Proven ability to lead through ambiguity, make strategic trade‑offs, and balance long‑term platform investments with near‑term business results.
• Exceptional written, visual, and verbal communication skills, including experience presenting to executives and cross‑functional partners.
• Experience running large‑scale A/B tests, user research, and multi‑surface experimentation programs.
• Bachelor’s degree in a technical or related field (Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, HCI) or equivalent experience.

Ideally, You Have

• Experience building or leading LLM‑powered products, such as AI search, conversational assistants, generative recommendations, or AI overviews.
• Background in information retrieval, recommender systems, or NLP, either in industry or academic research.
• Experience with large UGC ecosystems, marketplaces, or platforms where content quality and trust are central to discovery.
• Experience standing up or scaling a new product group or charter, including hiring and mentoring senior PMs.

Compensation

In the U.S., California, the expected salary range is $173,000 to $275,000.

Outside California in the U.S., the range is $142,500 to $266,250.

In Canada, the range is $181,000 CAD to $249,250 CAD.

Salary is determined by experience, skill set, education, and organizational needs and is one part of a total compensation package that includes equity and benefits.

Working at Scribd

We employ only those with a primary residence in or near one of our supported cities:

• United States: Atlanta | Austin | Boston | Dallas | Denver | Chicago | Houston | Jacksonville | Los Angeles | Miami | New York City | Phoenix | Portland | Sacramento | Salt Lake City | San Diego | San Francisco | Seattle | Washington D.C.
• Canada: Ottawa | Toronto | Vancouver
• Mexico: Mexico City

Benefits, Perks, and Well‑Being

• Benefits per location may vary.
• Healthcare Insurance Coverage (Medical/Dental/Vision): 100% paid for employees.
• 12 weeks paid parental leave.
• Short‑term/long‑term disability plans.
• 401k/RSP matching.
• Onboarding stipend for home‑office peripherals and accessories.
• Learning & Development allowance and programs.
• Quarterly stipend for wellness, Wi‑Fi, etc.
• Mental health support & resources.
• Free subscription to the Scribd Inc. suite of products.
• Referral bonuses.
• Book benefit.
• Sabbaticals.
• Company‑wide events.
• Team engagement budgets.
• Vacation & personal days.
• Paid holidays (including winter break).
• Flexible sick time.
• Volunteer day.
• Company‑wide Employee Resource Groups and inclusive workplace programs.
• Access to AI tools: free access to best‑in‑class AI tools to boost productivity and innovation.

Interview Process

We want our interview process to be accessible to everyone. You can inform us of any reasonable adjustments we can make to better accommodate your needs by emailing accommodations@scribd.com at any point in the interview process.

EEO Statement

Scribd is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We encourage people of all backgrounds to apply, and believe that a diversity of perspectives and experiences creates a foundation for the best ideas. Come join us in building something meaningful.

Seniority Level

Director

Employment Type

Full‑time

Job Function

Product Management and Marketing

Industries

Software Development

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