Sr. Technical Program Manager — Feed Ranking & Recommendations

Meta Meta · Big Tech · Bellevue, WA

Senior Technical Program Manager to lead the unification of two large-scale ranking stacks (content-first and interest-first) into a single, end-to-end recommendation system. This involves re-architecting production ranking systems, consolidating models, pipelines, and serving paths, while ensuring topline results are maintained. The role requires deep technical understanding, ability to operate in ambiguity, and strong collaboration across multiple teams.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own the end-to-end program to unify the content-first and interest-first ranking stacks — models, retrieval, value model, and control layer — onto a common recommendation-as-a-service foundation.
  2. Drive the migration from legacy dual pipelines to consolidated content pipelines across multiple surfaces (e.g., pages and groups), sequencing the transition to minimize risk.
  3. Lead multiple parallel workstreams with dedicated engineering owners, and sequence milestone launches (e.g., a unified multi-task ranking model, followed by a unified value model) to deliver measurable half-over-half progress.
  4. Partner deeply with recommendations-infrastructure teams on the hardest technical constraints: serving latency, online/offline parity, and feature generation and extraction.
  5. Manage launch-neutrality risk head-on — land large infrastructure migrations without topline regressions despite known latency tradeoffs of the newer serving stack; design the experimentation, ramp, and validation strategy to reach statistically-significant or neutral outcomes.

Skills

Required

  • Experience delivering large-scale technical programs in a matrixed organization, from inception through production
  • Hands-on experience with services or systems that apply machine learning, ranking, or recommendations at scale
  • Demonstrated ability to operate autonomously across multiple teams, with strong critical thinking and technical judgment
  • Communication and stakeholder-management experience, including building consensus and presenting to technical leadership
  • Direct experience with recommendation or ranking infrastructure — retrieval, model serving, value/utility modeling, feature platforms, or control/policy layers
  • Track record of launching ML models to production with accountability for topline product metrics
  • Experience leading consolidations, migrations, or re-platforming of large production systems without regressions
  • Fluency in serving performance and efficiency tradeoffs (latency, throughput, online/offline parity) and in GPU inference capacity planning
  • Experience running capacity or efficiency programs and quantifying savings
  • Demonstrated ability to integrate AI tools to optimize/redesign workflows and drive measurable impact (e.g., efficiency gains, quality improvements)
  • Experience adhering to and implementing responsible, ethical AI practices (e.g., risk assessment, bias mitigation, quality and accuracy reviews)
  • Demonstrated ongoing AI skill development (e.g., prompt/context engineering, agent orchestration) and staying current with emerging AI technologies

Nice to have

  • Familiarity with modern generative and foundational-model approaches to recommendations

What the JD emphasized

  • re-architecting production ranking systems without downtime
  • without regressing metrics that leadership watches closely
  • latency, capacity, launch neutrality, and delivery timelines are frequently in tension
  • Deep technical ambiguity
  • success depends on aligning many ML, infrastructure, data, and product teams — none of which you own — around one roadmap and one set of priorities.

Other signals

  • re-architecture in flight
  • unifying two historically separate large-scale ranking stacks
  • consolidation of production ranking systems
  • capacity savings
  • GPU inference