Engineering Manager - Search/ML/NLP/ElasticSearch

Engineering Manager - Search/ML/NLP/ElasticSearch

Remote - UK, US or German locations preferred.

About the role
I am supporting a global online marketplace business who are investing heavily in building a best-in-class search experience. They operate across multiple platforms, reaching millions of users worldwide, and search sits right at the heart of their product.

I am looking for an Engineering Manager with strong technical depth in search technologies, particularly Elasticsearch, to lead a team of engineers and drive the architecture and performance of their search platform. This role combines hands-on technical leadership with people management, helping shape the future of search relevance, ranking, and personalisation at scale.

What you'll be doing

• Lead and grow a team of engineers working on core search systems.
• Drive architecture and technical strategy for search relevance, ranking and retrieval.
• Partner with Product, Data and AI teams to define and deliver the search roadmap.
• Oversee migration and optimisation projects on Elasticsearch and the wider search stack.
• Troubleshoot and diagnose complex search issues (eg ingestion pipelines, ranking signals).
• Foster engineering excellence, mentoring team members and embedding best practices.

What we're looking for

• Experience as an Engineering Manager, Tech Lead, or similar role leading cross-functional teams.
• Deep expertise with Elasticsearch (tuning, scaling, migrations, relevance optimisation. Migration experience preferred).
• Strong background in ML, NLP, search, information retrieval or related fields (ranking models, vector databases & personalisation).
• A mix of strategic vision and hands-on capability - able to guide architecture while rolling up sleeves when needed.
• Experience collaborating with Product, ML and Analytics teams.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to translate technical work into business impact.