Senior Engineering Manager (AI Search & Retrieval)

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. 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. What You’ll Do 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. What You’ll Bring 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 & Product Acumen 4+ years of experience successfully leading, hiring, coaching, and developing high-performance engineering teams. Strategic Vision: Ability to possess and articulate a strong product and architectural vision for AI-driven platforms, balancing precision, recall, latency, and operational costs. Ambiguity to Execution: Proven ability to handle complex, high-volume production environments with excellent prioritization, time management, and a focus on measurable execution. Communication: Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs to business stakeholders and advocate for engineering health. Bonus Points Hands-on experience with vector search, embeddings, or semantic retrieval. Familiarity with offline search evaluation frameworks and online A/B experimentation. Experience in a high-growth, fast-paced SaaS, e-commerce search, or startup environment. What Success Looks Like in the First 30/60/90 Days First 30 Days: Immersion & Foundation Cultural & Process Acumen: Achieve a deep understanding of our core company values, the development lifecycle, and quality/release processes. Product Architecture Mastery: Develop a high-level comprehension of the AI Search & Retrieval architecture, its key components, and underlying data flows. Team & Project Mapping: Establish trusted working relationships with all team engineers. Gain a clear handle on all in-flight search initiatives, priorities, and individual ownership. First 60 Days: Ownership & Optimization Deep Component Knowledge: Attain a thorough understanding of search relevance systems, upstream/downstream dependencies, and how the platform delivers customer business value. Process Ownership: Fully own and optimize the team’s operating norms and processes (e.g., sprint planning, bug triage, query performance review, and on-call rotations). Internal Network: Establish key, cross-functional working relationships with Product, Applied Science, and Engineering leaders outside the immediate team. First 90 Days: Strategic Impact & Talent Development Operational Credibility: Successfully shepherd a small feature, enhancement, or optimization through to production deployment, validating system and process knowledge. Team & Quality Assessment: Develop a clear, objective insight into the team's technical strengths, weaknesses, and key skill or capacity gaps. Strategic Improvement Plan: Collaborate with Product and Engineering leadership to propose concrete suggestions for improving search relevance, system latency, or team efficiency. Talent Management Kick-off: Actively manage engineers' careers, establishing robust rapport and defining tailored growth opportunities for each team member. More things you'll like about Bloomreach: Culture: A great deal of freedom and trust. At Bloomreach we don’t clock in and out, and we have neither corporate rules nor long approval processes. This freedom goes hand in hand with responsibility. We are interested in results from day one. We have defined our 5 values and the 10 underlying key behaviors that we strongly believe in. We can only succeed if everyone lives these behaviors day to day. We've embedded them in our processes like recruitment, onboarding, feedback, personal development, performance review and internal communication. We believe in flexible working hours to accommodate your working style. We work virtual-first with several Bloomreach Hubs available across three continents. We organize company events to experience the global spirit of the company and get excited about what's ahead. We encourage and support our employees to engage in volunteering activities - every Bloomreacher can take 5 paid days off to volunteer*. The Bloomreach Glassdoor page elaborates on our stellar 4.4/5 rating. The Bloomreach Comparably page Culture score is even higher at 4.9/5 Personal Development: We have a People Development Program -- participating in personal development workshops on various topics run by experts from inside the company. We are continuously developing & updating competency maps for select functions. Our resident communication coach Ivo Večeřa is available to help navigate work-related communications & decision-making challenges.* Our managers are strongly encouraged to participate in the Leader Development Program to develop in the areas we consider essential for any leader. The program includes regular comprehensive feedback, consultations with a coach and follow-up check-ins. Bloomreachers utilize the $1,500 professional education budget on an annual basis to purchase education products (books, courses, certifications, etc.)* Well-being: The Employee Assistance Program -- with counselors -- is available for non-work-related challenges.* Subscription to Calm - sleep and meditation app.* We organize ‘DisConnect’ days where Bloomreachers globally enjoy one additional day off each quarter, allowing us to unwind together and focus on activities away from the screen with our loved ones. We facilitate sports, yoga, and meditation opportunities for each other. Extended parental leave up to 26 calendar weeks for Primary Caregivers.* Compensation: Restricted Stock Units or Stock Options are granted depending on a team member’s role, seniority, and location.* Everyone gets to participate in the company's success through the company performance bonus.* We offer an employee referral bonus of up to $3,000 paid out immediately after the new hire starts. We reward & celebrate work anniversaries -- Bloomversaries!* (*Subject to employment type. Interns are exempt from marked benefits, usually for the first 6 months.) Excited? Join us and transform the future of commerce experiences! If this position doesn't suit you, but you know someone who might be a great fit, share it - we will be very grateful! Any unsolicited resumes/candidate profiles submitted through our website or to personal email accounts of employees of Bloomreach are considered property of Bloomreach and are not subject to payment of agency fees. #LI-Remote