Engineering Manager, Maps & Search

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for an Engineering Manager, Maps & Search based in Canada.

The Engineering Manager, Maps & Search will lead a high‑impact engineering team responsible for building and scaling a world‑class search experience across web and mobile platforms.

This role combines technical leadership, hands‑on engineering, and people management in a fast‑growing technology environment.

You will guide the evolution of a high‑traffic search platform serving millions of users while improving speed, relevance, and reliability.

The position offers the opportunity to shape AI‑powered discovery experiences and influence how users interact with complex data at scale.

You will work closely with product, design, and engineering teams to define strategy, solve challenging technical problems, and deliver meaningful customer outcomes.

The ideal candidate is a technically strong leader who enjoys building teams, writing code, and driving innovation through modern engineering practices.

This is an opportunity to help define the future of intelligent search and scalable software development.

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team through hiring, onboarding, coaching, feedback, and career development.
• Maintain a hands‑on approach by contributing to architecture discussions, code reviews, technical decisions, debugging, and complex engineering challenges.
• Own the architecture, scalability, reliability, and performance of a high-throughput search platform handling significant traffic volumes.
• Drive improvements across search relevance, ranking, retrieval, latency, and overall user experience.
• Define technical roadmaps in partnership with product and design teams, translating business objectives into scalable engineering solutions.
• Lead initiatives from concept through production, ensuring quality, reliability, operational excellence, and successful delivery.
• Explore and implement AI-powered discovery capabilities, including intelligent ranking and LLM-driven workflows.
• Establish engineering best practices around system design, development processes, and operational maturity.
• Support incident response, capacity planning, and reliability improvements for critical production systems.
• Communicate technical strategies and trade‑offs clearly to engineering teams, product stakeholders, and leadership.
• Foster a collaborative engineering culture focused on innovation, ownership, and continuous learning.

The ideal candidate has extensive software engineering experience combined with proven leadership capabilities, strong technical judgement, and experience building scalable systems in fast-moving environments.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant senior or staff-level experience.
• 2+ years of experience managing engineering teams and developing high-performing engineers.
• Proven experience leading teams responsible for search, relevance, ranking, retrieval or discovery systems.
• Strong understanding of search technologies and concepts, including indexing, ranking, performance optimisation, and user intent.
• Deep expertise with Type Script, Node.js, and React, with strong full-stack understanding across frontend and backend systems.
• Experience designing and operating scalable microservice architectures in cloud-native environments.
• Strong knowledge of GraphQL, event-driven architectures, Kafka, databases, and distributed systems.
• Experience working with technologies such as PostgreSQL, Open Search, AWS, Kubernetes, Lambda, and Redis.
• Proven ability to operate high-traffic, low-latency production systems with strong understanding of SLOs, incident management, and capacity planning.
• Experience delivering high-impact technical initiatives from strategy through production within SaaS or technology-driven environments.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows and a strong interest in how AI is transforming software engineering.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts and trade-offs.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguous,…