Engineering Manager, Search Platform

ezCater is the #1 food tech platform for workplaces in the US. The company makes it easy for any organization to manage its food needs and order from over 125,000 restaurants nationwide. For workplaces, ezCater provides flexible and scalable solutions for everything from employee meal programs to one-off meetings, all backed by beyond helpful ²⁴⁄₇ service and business-grade reliability. For restaurant partners, ezCater helps grow their business by bringing them new high-value customers and large orders.

Search is the front door of the ezCater marketplace. Every browse, search, filter, and discovery experience runs through the systems this team owns, directly shaping customer experience, order volume, and our long-term platform advantage.

As the Engineering Manager of our Search Platform, you’ll lead the team responsible for how customers discover restaurants across ezCater, including the search engine, the indexing pipeline that feeds it, and the availability services that determine which restaurants can fulfill an order. We’re actively replatforming search, and this role will help strengthen the team while guiding the architecture, delivery, and operational maturity of that new foundation.

This is a technical management role reporting to the Director of Engineering. You’ll manage engineers directly, stay close to key technical decisions, and help the team improve relevance, freshness, reliability, and platform usability for internal partners.

What You’ll Do

• Lead delivery and technical quality across query serving, indexing, availability, and the APIs and contracts other teams depend on.
• Set technical direction for the search stack, including engine architecture, document schema, indexing and query patterns, ranking strategy, and migration sequencing.
• Own the freshness and correctness of the index and the availability domain so customers see restaurants that can actually fulfill an order.
• Stay close to the technical work by reviewing designs, challenging assumptions, and helping the team de-risk architecture and delivery decisions.
• Build a culture of measurement, experimentation, and continuous improvement in search quality, platform reliability, and operational performance.
• Coach, develop, and grow engineers through direct feedback, clear expectations, and a high technical bar for search engineering.
• Prioritize ruthlessly and sequence work effectively to reduce technical risk, improve execution, and unblock downstream teams.
• Partner closely with product, data, AI/ML, and platform engineering on relevance signals, experimentation, personalization, and shared infrastructure.
• Help the team build a strong foundation for the future, with clear ownership boundaries, strong engineering habits, and a platform others can confidently build on.

What You Have

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including experience leading teams or serving as a technical lead in complex backend or platform environments.
• Engineering management experience, with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers.
• Deep technical credibility in search or retrieval systems such as Vespa, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or Solr, ideally through a major re-architecture or build-from-scratch effort.
• Strong backend depth in distributed, event-driven systems; Go experience is preferred.
• Experience with indexing pipelines, document models, and event-streaming patterns that keep results fresh and correct.
• Strong instincts for relevance and ranking, and the ability to translate product goals into signals, evaluation approaches, and technical decisions.
• Experience with observability, production operations, and safe rollouts for correctness-critical systems.
• The judgment to balance technic…