Microsoft

Principal Product Manager, Content Ranking & Personalization AI

Microsoft$165K — $296K *
Consumer Technology
11 - 15 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's Degree with 15+ years in product management or software development, or equivalent experience.
  • Preferred 17+ years of experience in relevant roles.
  • 7+ years building consumer-facing recommendation or personalization products at scale.
  • Proven ability to define and implement product strategies at an organizational level.
  • Experience managing ranking or recommendation objectives end-to-end.
  • Deep experience with ranking and personalization platform architecture and multi-surface integration.
  • Familiarity with generative AI and large language models in consumer products.
  • Strong technical fluency across machine learning systems and evaluation platforms.

Responsibilities

  • Define product vision and strategy for AI-driven personalization solutions.
  • Translate user goals into detailed requirements for ranking and retrieval systems.
  • Communicate with senior leadership regarding strategy and investment decisions.
  • Determine ranking objectives that balance engagement, retention, and content diversity.
  • Drive the integration of user signals into ranking features for improved quality and context.
  • Design user interfaces for shared ranking stacks across different platforms.
  • Own evaluation frameworks including A/B testing and metrics for ranking performance.
  • Set long-term strategic direction for personalization technology and capabilities.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health insurance options.
  • Generous retirement savings plans.
  • Employee stock purchase plan.
  • Flexible work arrangements.
  • Career development and training opportunities as part of personal growth.
Full Job Description
Responsibilities
  • Define the product vision, strategy, and roadmap for AI-powered personalization across recommendation systems, user and content understanding, agentic memory, and generative AI content experiences.
  • Translate user and product goals into clear requirements for ranking, retrieval, profile generation, memory, data pipelines, evaluation, and serving systems.
  • Own communication with senior MAI leadership on overall strategy and investment.
  • Own the ranking objective and how it integrates personalization: decide what models optimize for, balancing engagement, retention, content diversity, safety, and long-term user value, and translate that into label strategies, training data requirements, and model plans.
  • Drive how signals become ranking features, including user behavior, content understanding, quality, freshness, and context. Work cross functionally to set quality bars for what enters the feature store and the models.
  • Design how Edge, Windows, Copilot, and partner surfaces consume the shared ranking stack through clear interfaces, per-surface tuning, and quality bars that scale integration.
  • Own the evaluation and experimentation framework: offline metrics that predict online outcomes, A/B test design, guardrail metrics, and proving ranking lift on engagement, retention, and business outcomes.
  • Set strategic direction for the personalization platform - user profiles, agentic memory, content understanding, generative recommendation, and serving infrastructure - ensuring compounding capability over time.
  • Align VP-level stakeholders across MAI and partner organizations, set prioritization frameworks, and influence resource allocation across multiple teams.
  • Partner with privacy, consent, legal, and policy teams to make ranking trustworthy by design.


Qualifications

Required:

  • Bachelor's Degree AND 15+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development, OR equivalent experience.


Preferred:

  • 17+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development, OR equivalent experience.


  • 7+ years building consumer-facing recommendation, personalization, search, feed, or content ranking products at scale.


  • Track record of defining and landing product strategy at the organizational level, influencing investment decisions and aligning senior leadership behind a technical product vision.


  • Experience owning ranking or recommendation objective functions end to end - deciding what models optimize for, not just how they optimize.


  • Deep experience with ranking and personalization platform architecture: user profiles, candidate retrieval, ranking models, signal pipelines, feature stores, evaluation systems, and multi-surface integration.


  • Experience with generative AI, LLMs, agents, user memory, or retrieval and ranking systems in production consumer products.


  • Strong technical fluency across ML systems, ranking architectures, data pipelines, experimentation platforms, and scalable serving infrastructure.


  • The combination of consumer product taste, systems rigor, and organizational leadership - caring about both the quality users feel and the strategy that compounds value over time.


  • Working knowledge of SQL, Python, experimentation platforms, analytics tools, or data investigation workflows.


#MicrosoftAI

Product Management IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $165,600 - $296,400 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $220,800 - $331,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

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Microsoft is an American multinational corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells a range of software products and services. Microsoft’s devices and consumer (D&C) licensing segment licenses the Windows operating system and related software, Microsoft Office for consumers, and the Windows Phone operating system. The company’s computing and gaming hardware segment provides Xbox gaming and entertainment consoles and accessories, second-party and third-party video games, and Xbox Live subscriptions; surface devices and accessories; and Microsoft PC accessories. Its phone hardware segment offers Lumia smartphones and other non-Lumia phones. Its D&C segment provides Windows Store, Xbox Live transactions, and Windows phone store; search advertising; display advertising; Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal; first-party video games; and other consumer products and services as well as operating retail stores. Microsoft’s commercial licensing segments license server products, including Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and related Client Access Licenses (CALs); Windows Embedded; Windows operating system; Microsoft Office for business, including Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and related CALs; Microsoft Dynamics business solutions; and Skype. Its commercial segment offers enterprise services, including premier support services and Microsoft consulting services; commercial cloud comprising Office 365 Commercial, other Microsoft Office online offerings, Dynamics CRM Online, and Microsoft Azure; and other commercial products and online services. The company markets and distributes its products through original equipment manufacturers, distributors, and resellers, as well as online.

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Size
181,000 employees
Market Cap
$1,762.4 billion
Industry
Net Income
$51.3 billion
Founded
1975
5 Year Trend
+15.5%
Revenue
$153.2 billion
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