Senior Engineering Manager - Search Retrieval (Consumer, Global Discovery)

As the world’s pioneering local delivery platform, our mission is to deliver an amazing experience, fast, easy, and to your door. We operate in over 70+ countries worldwide, powered by tech, designed by people. As one of Europe’s largest tech platforms, headquartered in Berlin, Germany. Delivery Hero has been listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since 2017 and is part of the MDAX stock market index. We enable creative minds to deliver solutions that create impact within our ecosystem. We move fast, take action and adapt. No matter where you're from or what you believe in, we build, we deliver, we lead. We are Delivery Hero.

We are on the lookout for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Search Retrieval Domain within Global Discovery. This domain builds and operates the Tier-1 systems that power customer search across all our brands—systems that must remain highly available, low-latency, and globally scalable.

This is a pivotal leadership role where you will manage multiple squads and engineering managers, guide long-term technical strategy, and ensure that our retrieval stack evolves into a world-class platform. If you are passionate about distributed search systems, leading autonomous teams, and shaping the future of how millions of customers discover what they need every day, we want to hear from you.

In this role you will,

• Lead the domain responsible for the foundational components of our customer search experience.

• Lead & Scale the Domain: Manage and mentor engineering managers and senior ICs across three or more squads. Establish a strong delegation framework so decisions happen closest to the context. Build a durable second layer of leadership and attract top engineering talent.

• Own Tier-1 Search Services: Lead squads responsible for our core retrieval services—ensuring global scalability, low latency, and high availability. Drive architectural evolution from legacy systems toward modern retrieval and indexing paradigms.

• Drive Technical & Operational Excellence: Define, monitor, and improve domain-level SLOs and SLAs. Ensure best-in-class on-call practices, incident response, and post-mortem culture. Champion engineering rigor and ensure practices are documented, lived, and continuously improved.

• Shape the Long-term Domain Vision: Translate tribe-level objectives into a clear technical roadmap for the retrieval domain. Balance feature development with reliability, cost efficiency, and modernization initiatives. Stay informed on cutting-edge developments in search technologies and identify opportunities to adopt them.

• Partner Across Product & Engineering: Collaborate with Product to shape long-term search strategy and investment. Coordinate cross-team initiatives and work with other domain leaders to ensure seamless integration across the Search and Discovery ecosystem.

• Proven architectural excellence and deep leadership experience.

• M2 Leadership Experience: You have several years of experience leading multiple squads through managers. You know how to scale teams, develop leaders, and operate autonomously at domain level while aligning with tribe strategy.

• Search & Retrieval Expertise: Deep understanding of search internals: indexing, retrieval, query processing, ranking, vector search, caching, and distributed search architectures. You’ve worked with technologies such as Elasticsearch, Lucene, Solr, OpenSearch, or custom retrieval engines.

• Building at Scale: A proven track record of operating or building Tier-1, highly available distributed systems. You understand performance tuning, system bottlenecks, concurrency management, and global scale operations.

• Technical Strategy & Operational Mastery: Experience defining technical roadmaps, evolving architectures, and driving engineering practices. You use delivery metrics and operational KPIs (latency, error rates, availability) to steer and improve teams.

• Strong Product & Stakeholder Alignment: Skilled at partnering with Product to translate business priorities into feasible engineering plans. Able to influence across domains, manage expectations, and communicate complex trade-offs clearly.

Ensuring you and all our Heroes are looked after, happy, and healthy is always on the menu. Because if you’re in good shape, then we’re in good shape.

• Make the most of our hybrid working model and join the team for face-to-face connection and collaboration in our beautiful Berlin campus 2 days a week

• We offer 27 days holiday with an extra day on 2nd and 3rd year of service

• We will support you in developing yourself and your career growth opportunities: 1.000 € Educational Budget, Language Courses, Parental Support and access to the Udemy Business platform to explore a variety of online courses.

• Get moving and release those wonderful, mind-boosting endorphins: Health Checkups, Meditation, Yoga, Gym & Bicycle Subsidy

• Cash. Dough. Cheddar. Whatever you call it, we’ll help you with it: Employee Share Purchase Plan, Sabbatical Bank,  Public Transportation Ticket Discount, Life & Accident Insurance, Corporate Pension Plan

• The power of getting together over some food is unrivaled. Here are a few ways to help you do that. All the yum: Digital Meal Vouchers, Food Vouchers, Corporate Discounts. Courses.

 

Ready to join our team? If you’re excited to grow, collaborate and be part of the world’s leading delivery platform, we’d love to hear from you. Apply today!

We believe diversity and inclusion are key to creating not only an exciting product, but also an amazing customer and employee experience. Fostering this starts with hiring - therefore we do not discriminate on the basis of racial identities, religious beliefs, color, national origin, gender identities or expressions, sexual orientations, age, marital or disability statuses, or any other aspect that makes you, you.

We encourage you to let us know if you need any accommodations or specific accessibility support to ensure a smooth interview experience—just let us know with an email to our Inclusion Officer at [email protected] it in your application.

Severely disabled applicants with equal qualifications will be given preferential consideration.

You're welcome to share your pronouns (he/she/they) right from the start so we can address you respectfully from our first contact.