Senior Engineering Manager (AI Search & Retrieval)

About the role

As a Senior Engineering Manager for AI Search & Retrieval , you will lead a high-performing team of engineers (including Senior Staff level talent) responsible for shaping the architecture and long-term evolution of our Search platform. You are a proven engineering leader who is passionate about mentoring technical talent, fostering a culture of psychological safety, and rallying a team to deliver on complex technical initiatives that directly contribute to business goals. This role is ideal for someone who balances strong people leadership with deep technical empathy for Search domains, distributed systems, and modern AI/ML production systems.

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership & Domain Strategy
• Evolve Search Architecture: Champion the technical roadmap and long-term strategy for core Search infrastructure, spanning indexing, retrieval, ranking, query-time execution, and data processing.
• Bridge Engineering & Applied Science: Partner closely with Applied Science and ML teams to productionize advanced ranking models, vector embeddings, and semantic retrieval techniques.
• System Excellence at Scale: Ensure search systems meet strict latency, availability, and cost-efficiency SLAs under heavy, real-world enterprise traffic.
• Modernize Data Pipelines: Direct the implementation of scalable data streaming and ingestion platforms to ensure search indexes are accurate, automated, and optimized.
• Team and Project Management
• Execute with Predictability: Collaborate closely with Product Management and cross-functional stakeholders to translate ambiguous business needs into clear, actionable technical roadmaps.
• SDLC & Operational Health: Manage the full project lifecycle using structured development cycles. Set high expectations for code quality, rigorous design reviews, change management, and search evaluation metrics (including A/B testing).
• Global Collaboration: Drive alignment and consensus across geographically distributed teams and time zones, proactively resolving dependencies and architectural conflicts.
• People Leadership & Culture
• Nurture High-Caliber Talent: Build, hire, and mentor a best-in-class search engineering team, fostering an inclusive culture of continuous learning, technical excellence, and high performance.
• Coach Technical Leaders: Act as a manager and career coach to senior technical talent (including Staff/Senior Staff engineers), creating growth opportunities, defining clear career paths, and helping them maximize their impact as multipliers.

Requirements

• Technical Depth & Experience
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record in backend infrastructure, distributed systems, and large-scale computing.
• Strong domain expertise in Search or Information Retrieval systems, including understanding of search relevance, ranking, and catalog indexing.
• Deep data ecosystem knowledge: Experience with big data processing or streaming technologies (e.g., Spark, Kafka, Flink, Solr, Lucene, or Elasticsearch).
• Cloud Operations: 4+ years of hands-on experience architecting and operating production systems within AWS, GCP, or another major cloud provider.
• Language Proficiency: Strong foundations in core production languages, with Java and/or Python strongly preferred.
• Leadership & Pr

Benefits

Additional Information

Bloomreach is building the world's premier agentic platform for personalization .We're revolutionizing how businesses connect with their customers, building and deploying AI agents to personalize the entire customer journey. We're taking autonomous search mainstream, making product discovery more intuitive and conversational for customers, and more profitable for businesses. We're making conversational shopping a reality, connecting every shopper with tailored guidance and product expertise - available on demand, at every touchpoint in their journey. We're designing the future of autonomous marketing , taking the work out of workflows, and reclaiming the creative, strategic, and customer-first work marketers were always meant to do. And we're building all of that on the intelligence of a single AI engine - Loomi AI - so that personalization isn't only autonomous...it's also consistent.From retail to financial services, hospitality to gaming, businesses use Bloomreach to drive higher growth and lasting loyalty. We power personalization for more than 1,400 global brands, including American Eagle, Sonepar, and Pandora. About the Team: AI Search & Retrieval The AI Search & Retrieval team owns our core search platform, serving hundreds of millions of queries per day across enterprise customers. We build and operate highly scalable, low-latency systems that combine traditional information retrieval with modern ML-driven ranking, semantic understanding, and large-scale data processing-all in production at scale. This team sits at the intersection of systems engineering, search relevance, and applied ML, with a direct impact on customer revenue and experience.

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