About this Staff Product Manager, Personalization & AI role at CookUnity
About CookUnity:
Food has lost its soul to modern convenience. And with it, it has lost the power to nourish, inspire, and connect us. So in 2018, CookUnity was founded as the first-of-its-kind platform that connects the world with the source of truly great food: chefs. Today, CookUnity delivers 50 million meals a year from the industry’s best chefs to homes all over the country. Fresh. Ready-to-eat. And crafted with the passion that nourishes body and soul.
Unwilling to stop there, CookUnity is expanding beyond delivery to become an ever-innovating marketplace focused on our singular mission: empower Chefs to nourish the world.
If that mission has you hungry in more ways than one, you’ve found the right job posting.
The Role
We're looking for a Staff Product Manager, Personalization & AI to lead the product vision, strategy, and execution of two interconnected pillars: our next-gen personalization systems (menu ranking, recommendations, search, predictive preferences, and adaptive UI) and a new customer-facing AI experience powered by LLMs.
This role will own both the personalization engine across the entire eater journey and the 0→1 build of a customer-facing AI experience—and will work cross-functionally with ML, LLM engineering, frontend and backend engineering, data science, design, and our culinary teams to build a highly adaptive, intelligent food experience.
You'll go deep into understanding eater behaviors, intent signals, and food preferences, and translate them into a scalable roadmap across both personalization and conversational AI that meaningfully lifts retention, conversion, and LTV. Our users make hundreds of micro-decisions every week; the goal is to simplify all of them—whether through intelligent ranking or a natural-language experience.
What You'll Do
Define & Drive Product Strategy
- Own the end-to-end personalization roadmap including recommendations, ranking algorithms, adaptive feed, intent modeling, and predictive food preferences.
- Build a unified personalization strategy that spans discovery, ordering, search, and post-order experiences.
- Translate customer insights and behavioral data into frameworks for "personalized ordering journeys" across weekly menus.
Ship High-Impact Personalization Features
- Partner with Engineering and ML to design, build, and iterate on models that personalize menus, recommendations, and content surfaces.
- Launch new ML-powered features—e.g., personalized ranking, contextual suggestion surfaces, food-intent clustering, dietary preference modeling, and personalization-aware UX.
- Drive experimentation, A/B testing, and offline/online model evaluation frameworks to measure lift rigorously.
Build the Customer-Facing AI Experience (0→1)
- Own the 0→1 product vision and roadmap for a customer-facing conversational AI experience—from problem definition and early MVP through launch and iteration.
- Define use cases, conversation flows, and success criteria, balancing eater needs with technical feasibility and business goals.
- Partner closely with LLM engineering to evaluate models, define grounding strategies, and drive prompt/context architecture decisions from a product lens.
- Own the full frontend product surface for the AI experience end-to-end, from UX vision through shipped features.
- Establish evaluation frameworks for LLM product quality—including relevance, hallucination rate, tone, and task completion—and iterate based on real user feedback.
Deeply Understand Customer Behavior
- Develop a sophisticated understanding of eater behavior patterns, including early-week ordering signals, cuisine preferences, dietary constraints, and long-term engagement drivers.
- Work closely with Data Science to identify behavioral segments, affinity clusters, and downstream retention impacts.
Cross-Functional Leadership
- Own the end-to-end frontend product surface for the customer-facing AI experience, partnering closely with Design and Engineering from concept through launch.
- Collaborate on personalization-related frontend surfaces (adaptive homepage, personalized filters, recommendation UI)—contributing product direction while partnering with other PMs and Design who share ownership.
- Work with Chefs and Culinary to incorporate menu diversity, cuisine metadata, and ingredient-level signals into both personalized and AI-assisted experiences.
- Collaborate with Growth, CRM, and Marketplace teams to personalize acquisition, onboarding, and reactivation journeys.
Drive Measurable Business Impact
- Improve core funnel metrics (CVR, add-to-cart rate, search success rate).
- Lift order retention, order frequency, and net AOV for all eater segments.
- Increase long-term revenue and reduce decision friction for customers navigating a large menu.
You Are
- Experienced in ML-powered product development, ranking algorithms, recommendations systems, or personalization platforms.
- Excited about building 0→1 conversational AI products and comfortable navigating the ambiguity of LLM-powered experiences.
- Technically grounded in how LLMs work—prompting, RAG, evaluation, guardrails—and able to partner fluently with LLM engineers.
- Analytical, systems-oriented, and comfortable with experimentation frameworks, model evaluation, and user behavior analytics.
- A strong frontend product thinker who can own customer-facing UX and translate backend AI capabilities into intuitive, delightful user experiences.
- Skilled at simplifying complex technical problems into user-centric solutions.
- Excited by the challenge of turning a large, dynamic food catalog into a highly personalized weekly experience.
- Collaborative, decisive, and able to partner tightly with Engineering, ML, Design, and cross-functional product groups.
- Customer-obsessed and eager to understand why users choose the meals they do—and how to anticipate their next choice.
Qualifications
- 7+ years of product management experience, including at least 4+ years working on personalization, search, recommendations, ML/AI products, or similar domains.
- Experience with LLM-powered products, conversational AI, or chatbot development—hands-on 0→1 experience a strong plus.
- Strong analytical and technical intuition; can work closely with ML/infra teams and reason about relevance, ranking, and experimentation approaches.
- Proven ability to drive complex products from concept to launch in fast-paced environments.
- Experience with A/B testing platforms, online metrics, offline model evaluation, and data-driven decision making.
- Demonstrated ability to own customer-facing frontend product surfaces end-to-end, from UX vision through launch.
- Strong user experience instincts with a track record of collaborating closely with design.
- Excellent communication skills and ability to influence stakeholders at all levels.
Why Join Us
- Build the core engine behind the future of personalized and AI-powered food experiences.
- Own a deeply impactful part of the product that directly influences customer happiness and long-term retention.
- Collaborate with a world-class team of engineers, data scientists, designers, and chefs.
- Work in a fast-growing, chef-driven marketplace experiencing rapid expansion across the U.S. and Canada.
- Competitive compensation, equity package, and benefits.
Benefits
🩺 Health Insurance coverage
🌅 401k Plan
⛱ Unlimited PTO
🗓️ 5- year Sabbatical: After 5 years with CookUnity, you get a 4-week paid sabbatical
🐣 Paid Family leave
🕯 Compassionate Leave: 3-5 days each time the need arises
🥘 A generous amount of CookUnity credits to enjoy our amazing meals, added to your account, monthly
🤖 AI-forward workplace: enterprise access to ChatGPT and Claude to help you work smarter and grow faster.
🧘🏽♀️ Wellness perks: access to fitness subsidies to build a healthy lifestyle
👩🏾🏫 Personalized Spanish coach
🚀 Awesome opportunity to join a company that is looking to change how we eat and how chefs work!
Compensation
All final pay rates will be determined by candidates experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of the applicant, internal equity, and alignment with market data.If you’re interested in this role, please submit your application, and if we think you might be a fit, we'll get in touch with you. Thank you for your time!
CookUnity is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are dedicated to creating a community of inclusion and an environment free from discrimination or harassment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, citizenship status, protected veteran status, genetic information, or physical or mental disability.
A quick note for all candidates
We’ve recently seen an increase in recruitment scams across the industry, and we want to make sure you (and your data) stay safe while applying to CookUnity. We also want you to know that we take this seriously — sometimes, as part of our process, we may ask for a brief “proof of humanity” to confirm that we’re connecting with a real person, not an impersonator. Here are a few tips to help you protect yourself and know what to expect from us:
- Apply only through our official channels. All open roles are listed on our official careers page: careers.cookunity.com
- Our recruiters are real people — and easy to verify. You can always find them on LinkedIn with verified profiles. If you’re unsure, feel free to reach out to us on our official LinkedIn Company Page.
- We only communicate through official CookUnity channels. That means emails ending in
@cookunity.comand interviews held through official company platforms (Google Meet or Zoom) — never WhatsApp, Telegram, or SMS. - We’ll never ask for payment or personal financial details. If anyone does, please don’t share any information and let us know right away.
If something ever feels off or you’re unsure about a message, we’d much rather you double-check with us. You can always contact us directly through any of our social media channels. We appreciate your interest in joining CookUnity — and we care about keeping your experience (and safety) as genuine as possible.
