Engineering Manager - Search Engine Team

About the Role

Key Responsibilities

• Manage a 10-12-person remote team including two tech leads, responsible for coaching, hiring, and performance management, while shaping an inclusive and growth-oriented engineering culture.
• Lead the transition from legacy Solr infrastructure to modern, semantic, and hybrid search solutions leveraging AWS.
• Drive roadmap planning in collaboration with product and ML leadership.
• Oversee and evolve the current search indexing pipeline and AWS infrastructure.
• Partner with internal experts to explore LLMs, vector databases, and semantic models for enhanced customer discovery.
• Work closely with product managers, architects, and machine learning teams to align on feature development, scalability, and performance.
• Ensure system uptime, stability, and quality across all stages of development and production.
• Proactively manage risk and incident response processes.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 4+ years of engineering management experience (minimum of 2 required).
• Prior hands-on software development experience (Java/AWS preferred).
• Experience modernizing large-scale search systems.
• Deep expertise in Solr search engine technologies.
• Familiarity with semantic search, vector databases, and hybrid search models.
• Proven ability to work with ML teams and integrate search with AI/ML capabilities.
• Strong leadership, communication, and technical strategy development skills.
• Comfortable with remote-first environment.
• Willingness to travel to Chicago once per quarter.

Nice to Have

• Experience with LLM integration in eCommerce or search platforms.
• Background in AWS-based infrastructure and indexing pipelines.
• Familiarity with tools and platforms like Elasticsearch, Vespa, or Pinecone.
• Exposure to managing a blend of FTEs and contractors with a plan to convert to all FTEs.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).

Benefits & Perks

• Paid parental leave
• Dental insurance
• Tuition reimbursement
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance
• Employee discount
• Life insurance
• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance plans with coverage starting on day one
• 6 free therapy sessions annually
• 18 paid time off days annually and 6 company holidays
• 6% company contribution to a 401(k) plan
• Employee discounts, tuition reimbursement, student loan refinancing, and financial counseling
• Maternity and paternity leave benefits