Engineering Manager

About the Company

ZAGENO offers the largest life sciences lab supply marketplace. Our one-stop shop helps scientists, lab managers, and procurement leaders compare products, source alternatives, track deliveries, and communicate order statuses in real time, accelerating innovation by saving valuable time. Leveraging advanced AI, ZAGENO enhances supply chain resilience and makes the customer experience superior, seamlessly integrating with existing systems to boost productivity and make online shopping for research materials convenient, efficient, and reliable. We are committed to innovation, excellence, and fostering a supportive, and dynamic work environment. 

About the role

As the Engineering Manager – eCommerce Search Experience, you will lead a team of talented engineers responsible for building and optimizing ZAGENO’s intelligent product discovery platform. You’ll shape how scientists,lab managers find products by improving search relevance, ranking, personalization, and end-to-end search performance.

This role is ideal for a technical leader passionate about large-scale search systems, AI/ML-driven ranking, and building exceptional customer experiences in eCommerce.

Key Responsibilities

• Leadership & Strategy
  • Lead and grow a team of backend,and FE engineers focused on Search, Ranking, and Product Discovery.
  • Collaborate with Product, Data Engineering, and UX teams to define the long-term search roadmap.
  • Drive architecture and design discussions for scalable and intelligent search systems.
  • Foster a culture of high performance, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Technical Delivery
  • Oversee end-to-end design, development, and optimization of search pipelines (indexing, query processing, ranking).
  • Own search KPIs — including relevance, latency, clickthrough rate, and conversion metrics.
  • Implement experimentation frameworks (A/B testing, offline evaluation) to measure search quality improvements.
  • Guide migration or scaling of Elasticsearch/OpenSearch infrastructure and ensure data freshness, accuracy, and resilience.
• Stakeholder Management
  • Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, UX designers, and marketplace stakeholders.
  • Communicate technical trade-offs, project risks, and roadmap progress effectively to business leadership.
  • Partner with analytics teams to translate user behavior data into actionable search insights.
    

Must Have:

• 8-12 years of total engineering experience, including 3+ years in a people management and technical leadership role.
• Strong technical foundation in search, ranking, and retrieval systems (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or similar).
• Proven experience in eCommerce search or large-scale catalog discovery systems.
• Proven experience in tracking sprint health, predictability, and delivery.
• Hands-on experience with Python/Java and modern backend frameworks.
• Experience designing data pipelines for indexing, enrichment, and query understanding.
• Understanding of search relevance tuning, synonyms, embeddings, re-ranking, and personalization.
• Strong architectural skills — ability to design scalable, high-availability search systems.
• Excellent communication, mentoring, and stakeholder management skills.
• Exposure to LLMs or vector search (semantic/embedding search) for product discovery.
• Experience with GCP, AWS, Kubernetes, and CI/CD for production-grade deployments.

Good to Have:

• Knowledge of recommendation systems and personalized ranking models.
• Familiarity with analytics-driven decision making (e.g., search dashboards, clickstream analysis).

Success Metrics

• Improved Search Relevance Score (Click-Through Rate, conversion, engagement).
• Reduced Search Latency and improved scalability.
• Increased scientist satisfaction and time-to-product efficiency.
• Team health: retention, growth, and delivery predictability.