Director, Product Discovery

Position: Director, Product Discovery (Scribd.com)
Director, Product Discovery

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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.

About the Team and Role

We are building a new Discovery product , and this role is the founding Director of Product for that group. You will lead the strategy and execution across our recommendations, search, ranking, and discovery experiences. Our corpus spans hundreds of millions of documents, and our goal is not just to help people find files, but to help hundreds of millions of applied learners discover the knowledge inside those documents.

You will 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 ’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 you can just as easily frame a 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.

Lead and Grow a World‑Class Product Organization

• 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.

Build Next‑Generation Discovery Systems Using LLMs and ML

• 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.

Create AI‑Forward Discovery Experiences for Learners

• 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.

Champion a Rigorous Experimentation and Metrics Culture

• Define the metrics that matter for long‑term subscription value,…