Sr. Manager, Software Engineering (Search)

About Highspot
Highspot is a software product development company and a recognized global leader in the sales enablement category, leveraging cutting-edge AI and GenAI technologies at the core of its robust Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. Highspot is revolutionizing how millions of individuals work worldwide. Through its AI-powered platform, Highspot drives enterprise transformation to empower sales teams through intelligent content management, training, contextual guidance, customer engagement, meeting intelligence, and actionable analytics. The Highspot platform delivers advanced features tailored to business needs, in a modern design that sales and marketing executives appreciate and is the #1 rated sales enablement platform on G2 Crowd.

While headquartered in Seattle, Highspot has expanded its footprint across America, Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia, and now India, solidifying its presence in the Asia Pacific markets.

About the Role
As a Senior Engineering Manager – Search, you will lead and inspire a talented team of backend and search engineers responsible for evolving Highspot’s core search & recommendation capabilities. You’ll drive innovation in search relevance, ranking, recommendations, and large-scale data systems that power discovery across the Highspot platform. This role requires a blend of technical depth, strategic thinking, and people leadership. You’ll collaborate closely with cross-functional partners in Product, Design, and Data Science to ensure Highspot continues to deliver fast, intelligent, and delightful search experiences for our customers worldwide.

Responsibilities:
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of search and backend engineers focused on high-impact, scalable search solutions.
• Own the technical vision for search architecture combining traditional and vector based, including relevance, ranking models, and distributed indexing systems.
• Drive execution excellence — set goals, manage delivery timelines, and ensure consistent progress against engineering objectives.
• Collaborate with Product and Data Science to translate customer and business needs into measurable search and content recommendation improvements.
• Optimize and scale our enterprise search stack (Lucene, Solr, ZooKeeper, or similar technologies) to support massive data volumes.
• Oversee the design and delivery of highly available distributed services and RESTful APIs integrated into Highspot’s platform.
• Partner with DevOps to ensure reliability, observability, and performance across multiple data centers.
• Champion AI-driven enhancements to improve personalization, ranking, and search recommendations.
• Foster a culture of quality, inclusion, and accountability, emphasizing mentorship, continuous learning, and technical excellence.
• Partner cross-functionally to ensure alignment between platform strategy and product outcomes, including stakeholder communication and risk management.

Required Qualifications::
• 3+ years of experience managing engineering teams, with a proven record of developing and scaling backend or search systems.7+ years of total software development experience with cloud-native SaaS platforms.
• Strong background in search & recommendation technologies such as Lucene, Solr, Opensearch, Elasticsearch, RAG, or similar frameworks.
• Deep understanding of enterprise search architecture, schema design, and relevance tuning.
• Proven success building REST APIs, distributed systems, and integrating services using AWS or similar cloud platforms.
• Experience with object-oriented and functional programming languages, such as JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, or Ruby.
• Familiarity with machine learning and AI concepts for ranking, personalization, or content recommendations.
• Track record of attracting and developing diverse talent, fostering a collaborative and inclusive culture.
• Strong leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills able to balance technical depth with strategic decision-making.

Additional Qualifications::
• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, Engineering, or related field.
• 10+ years of experience hands-on experience to design and build scalable, high-quality customer-facing software

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Equal Opportunity Statement
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of age, ancestry, citizenship, color, ethnicity, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or invisible disability status, political affiliation, veteran status, race, religion, or sexual orientation.

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