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 an Engineering Manager – eCommerce Search Experience, you will lead a high-impact team responsible for building and evolving ZAGENO’s product discovery and search platform. This role blends technical depth with people leadership, focusing on improving search relevance, scalability, and user experience. You will play a critical role in shaping how scientists and procurement teams find the right products—faster and more intuitively—through advancements in search ranking, personalization, and AI/ML-driven discovery. This role is ideal for a hands-on leader who can balance execution excellence, architectural thinking, and team development.

Key Responsibilities

1. Engineering Leadership & Team Development

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of backend and frontend engineers (6–10 members).
• Foster a culture of ownership, high performance, and continuous improvement.
• Drive sprint predictability, engineering quality, and delivery excellence.

1. Technical Strategy & Architecture

• Define and evolve the architecture for scalable, high-performance search systems.
• Drive design decisions across indexing pipelines, query processing, and ranking frameworks.
• Ensure systems are resilient, observable, and cost-efficient.
• Guide adoption of modern search paradigms including semantic search and vector-based retrieval.

1. Product & Search Experience Ownership

• Own key search metrics: relevance, latency, CTR, and conversion.
• Collaborate with Product, UX, and Data teams to define and execute the search roadmap.
• Translate user behavior and analytics into actionable improvements in discovery experience.
• Champion experimentation culture (A/B testing, offline evaluation frameworks).

1. Delivery & Execution

• Oversee end-to-end delivery of search platform enhancements—from design to production.
• Ensure high-quality releases, minimizing gaps between product requirements and engineering output.
• Manage dependencies across teams and proactively mitigate risks.
• Drive continuous improvements in development processes, CI/CD, and observability.

1. Stakeholder Management

• Communicate effectively with product, business, and senior leadership.
• Provide clarity on trade-offs, timelines, and technical risks.
• Partner with analytics and marketplace teams to align on business outcomes.

Must Have:

• 9–11 years of software engineering experience with 2–4 years in engineering management.

• Strong experience with search and retrieval systems (e.g., Elasticsearch/OpenSearch).

• Proven track record in eCommerce or large-scale product discovery platforms.

• Hands-on experience with Java or Python and modern backend architectures.

• Deep understanding of: • Search relevance tuning (synonyms, boosting, ranking strategies)

• Indexing pipelines and data enrichment

• Query understanding and optimization

• Experience with Agile execution, sprint predictability, and engineering metrics.

• Strong system design skills for high-scale, low-latency systems.

• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines.

• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and mentoring skills.

Good to Have:

• Exposure to vector search, embeddings, or LLM-powered discovery.
• Experience with personalization or recommendation systems.
• Prior experience scaling or migrating search infrastructure.

Success Metrics

• Measurable improvement in search relevance (CTR, conversion rate, engagement).
• Reduction in search latency and system bottlenecks.
• Increased user satisfaction and faster product discovery journeys.
• Improved team velocity, predictability, and retention.
• Establishment of a robust experimentation and metrics-driven culture.

Our benefits

• Working for a mission-driven business with a meaningful challenge with a positive impact on the scientific community

• A clear growth perspective

• A learning and development budget to enable your ambitions to grow professionally in your field

• A professional and dynamic team with a global vision and mindset

• An exciting, international working environment - we have more than 40 nationalities!

• We’ve got your health benefits (medical, dental, and vision)

• Hybrid Work with 3 days work from office in our Bangalore office

• Staying healthy and fit is essential - we cover a part of your gym membership!

• Holidays and allotted paid time off

• Paid family leave

• A budget to improve your home office environment

ZAGENO is on a mission to accelerate scientific breakthroughs by streamlining laboratory supply purchasing processes with its award-winning, first-of-its-kind e-commerce platform. With over 40 million product SKUs available from more than 5,000 brands, ZAGENO makes online shopping for any research material convenient, efficient, and reliable. Backed by top tier venture capitalists, ZAGENO is building a company focused on supporting scientists in their quest for new and life-changing discoveries, and our goals are as ambitious as the scientists we support. Learn more at https://zageno.com/.