Director Of Product, Algorithms & Personalization

AI overview

Lead the algorithm and personalization strategy at VRChat to enhance user connections, drive engagement through innovative matchmaking, and ensure safety and trust in user interactions.
Join the VRChat Team! VRChat’s mission is to enrich the world through immersive social connection. VRChat offers a first-of-its-kind platform that provides our users with an endless array of social VR experiences and gives the power of creation to its robust community. We have raised $100M to date with the support of investors Makers Fund, Anthos Capital and HTC and are building out a strong team to achieve hyper-growth in the coming years. Job Overview Every day, millions of people meet, form bonds, and build communities in VRChat. Our job is to help users connect with people and experiences they’ll love, faster and more reliably, through world-class algorithms. The Director of Product, Algorithms & Personalization is an individual contributor role on VRChat’s product team. This role will lead VRChat’s end-to-end algorithm and personalization strategy across: Matchmaking: helping users find people they’re likely to become friends with Discovery: ranking and recommending worlds, groups, and events to drive meaningful engagement and belonging Trust & Safety: models that detect predatory and toxic behavior, ensuring our users can have high quality interactions and safe experiences. You will partner closely with ML/Engineering, Data Science, Design, Community, Trust & Safety, Policy, Legal, and Operations to design and ship algorithmic systems that improve user experience while managing platform integrity, safety, and privacy tradeoffs. This role has significant executive visibility, with regular updates to senior leadership and, when needed, the board. What Algorithms & Personalization includes at VRChat
  • Building and evolving recommender systems (retrieval, ranking, and re-ranking) for worlds, groups, and events
  • Designing social matchmaking experiences and models
  • Developing user and content understanding: embeddings, taxonomies, intent signals, quality signals, and cold-start strategies
  • Shipping real-time and session-aware personalization
  • Establishing measurement and experimentation: offline metrics, online A/B testing, guardrails, long-term impact
  • Building the product and platform foundations: logging, feature stores, model iteration loops, and ops tooling for diagnostics
  • Responsibilities
  • Own the product strategy for personalization, matchmaking, and discovery across VRChat, including worlds, groups, events, and social connections.
  • Lead the roadmap for algorithmic systems spanning candidate generation, ranking, diversity and novelty controls, exploration vs. exploitation, and session- and context-aware recommendations.
  • Partner closely with ML/Engineering and Data Science to deliver production-grade models and pipelines, covering data instrumentation, feature development, evaluation, and iteration.
  • Design user-facing experiences that translate algorithmic capabilities into clear, differentiated user value.
  • Define and operationalize success metrics across relevance, retention, social outcomes (e.g., friendship formation), and ecosystem health (e.g., creator success), with strong guardrails.
  • Own experimentation end-to-end, from hypothesis generation and test design to analysis, rollout, and ongoing tuning.
  • Ensure system quality and integrity by addressing spam, manipulation, low-quality content, feedback loops, and unintended consequences, in partnership with Trust & Safety and Policy.
  • Communicate progress, tradeoffs, and outcomes clearly to executives and cross-functional partners, driving alignment on goals and execution.
  • Experience, Skills & Qualifications
  • 7+ years of product management experience on large-scale consumer platforms.
  • Deep experience building algorithm-driven products: personalization, ranking, recommender systems, feeds, search/discovery, or matchmaking.
  • Strong fluency in experimentation and measurement: A/B testing, counterfactual thinking, metrics design, and causal reasoning basics.
  • Ability to work effectively with technical teams on ML systems: model lifecycle, data pipelines, evaluation, deployment/monitoring, and iteration.
  • Strong product judgment around tradeoffs: relevance vs. diversity, short-term engagement vs. long-term satisfaction, growth vs. ecosystem health.
  • Excellent communication skills. You can translate complex technical concepts into crisp decisions and narratives.
  • Benefits
  • Work from anywhere! VRChat is a 100% remote company
  • Health Benefits
  • 401K for US & RRSP for Canadian Employees
  • Stock Options
  • Generous paid holiday schedule
  • Unlimited/Flexible vacation time
  • Paid parental leave benefits
  • VRChat is an equal-opportunity employer, and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds. VRChat fosters a diverse, creative, and collaborative environment where anyone can contribute to any of the ongoing projects or direction of the roadmap at any time.  If you’re a passionate team player who wants to have an impact on a dynamic team, we’d love to hear from you!All job offers are subject to satisfactory referencing and background checks.

    Perks & Benefits Extracted with AI

    • Health Insurance: Health Benefits
    • Unlimited vacation: Unlimited/Flexible vacation time
    • Paid Parental Leave: Paid parental leave benefits
    • Remote-Friendly: Work from anywhere! VRChat is a 100% remote company

    VRChat makes it easy to create and explore virtual reality together. Any 3D content brought onto our platform is instantly transformed into a social experience.

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