Engineering Manager, Search Platform (Remote)

Role Overview

Engineering Manager, Search Platform (Remote) Lead the engineering team responsible for how customers discover restaurants on ezCater. Own and improve the search engine, the indexing pipeline, and availability services that determine which restaurants can fulfill orders. You’ll also help guide an active replatforming of search.

Responsibilities

• Lead delivery and ensure technical quality across:
  • Query serving
  • Indexing
  • Availability
  • APIs and contracts used by other teams
• Set technical direction for the search stack, including:
  • Engine architecture
  • Document schema
  • Indexing and query patterns
  • Ranking strategy
  • Migration sequencing
• Own freshness and correctness of the index and availability domain so customers see fulfillable restaurants.
• Stay hands-on: review designs, challenge assumptions, and de-risk architecture and delivery.
• Drive a culture of measurement, experimentation, and continuous improvement for search quality, reliability, and operational performance.
• Coach and grow engineers via direct feedback and a high technical bar.
• Prioritize and sequence work to reduce technical risk and unblock downstream teams.
• Partner with product, data, AI/ML, and platform engineering on relevance signals, experimentation, personalization, and shared infrastructure.
• Establish clear ownership boundaries and strong engineering habits so others can build on the platform confidently.

Requirements

• 8+ years software engineering experience, including team leadership or technical lead experience in complex backend/platform environments.
• Engineering management experience: hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers.
• Deep technical credibility in search/retrieval systems (e.g., Vespa, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr), ideally from a major re-architecture or build-from-scratch effort.
• Backend depth in distributed, event-driven systems; Go preferred.
• Experience with indexing pipelines, document models, and event-streaming patterns that keep results fresh and correct.
• Strong relevance and ranking instincts; ability to translate product goals into signals, evaluation approaches, and technical decisions.
• Experience with observability, production operations, and safe rollouts for correctness-critical systems.

Nice to Have / Preferred

• Go experience.
• Experience strengthening operational maturity during search platform replatforming.