Paid search manager Jobs in Washington, DC

Job Description

Job Description

Senior Product Manager, Search About the Client

Our client is a fast-growing, product-led B2B platform that connects professional buyers with an extensive catalog of specialty products. Operating across North America, they power time-sensitive discovery and ordering workflows for thousands of users daily. The company blends marketplace operations with modern data and search technology to deliver reliable, high-quality results at scale.

About the Role

You’ll be the end-to-end owner of search and discovery. Your mission is to improve how users find the right products—fast—by shaping strategy, defining the roadmap, and shipping features that lift relevance, recall, and conversion. You’ll partner closely with engineering, data science, design, and operations to evolve everything from indexing and ranking to facets, filters, and UX.

Responsibilities

Own the search strategy, OKRs, and roadmap (query understanding, ranking, recall / precision, and latency).

Translate user and business needs into clear PRDs, specs, and experiments; prioritize ruthlessly.

Drive relevance improvements : signals, scoring features, boosting, synonym / typo handling, and zero-result mitigation.

Evolve information architecture : categories, taxonomies, attributes, facets, and structured data quality.

Partner with engineering to advance the search stack (e.g., Elasticsearch / OpenSearch / Solr, vector / semantic search, embeddings, re-ranking).

Design and interpret A / B tests; monitor metrics such as search success rate, CTR, add-to-cart, conversion, reformulation rate, and time-to-find.

Collaborate with design on intuitive search UX : autosuggest, query builder, result layouts, filters, saved searches, and recent activity.

Work with data teams on ingestion, deduplication, enrichment, and freshness SLAs; improve crawl / ingest pipelines.

Establish operational playbooks : relevance tuning cadences, quality audits, and incident response for search outages.

Communicate outcomes and insights to stakeholders; champion a discovery-driven, experiment-first culture.

Requirements

5–8+ years in Product Management with meaningful ownership of search, discovery, or recommendations in a data-rich product.

Proven delivery of measurable relevance and conversion improvements via experimentation.

Strong quantitative skills; comfortable with dashboards and SQL to self-serve insights.

Experience partnering with search / relevance engineers and data scientists (signals, features, embeddings, re-rankers).

Familiarity with enterprise search technologies (e.g., Elasticsearch / OpenSearch / Solr / Lucene) and modern experimentation / analytics tools.

Excellent product sense and UX instincts; ability to turn ambiguous problems into simple, effective experiences.

Clear, concise communicator who can align cross-functional teams and influence at multiple levels.

Preferred

Exposure to vector databases / ANN, semantic search, LLM-powered retrieval / rewrites, or learning-to-rank.

Background in marketplace, catalog, or multi-attribute product search.

Experience improving data quality (attributes, taxonomy, normalization) at scale.

Benefits & Why Join

High Impact : Own a mission-critical surface used by every customer, every day.

Complex Problem Space : Blend ML-driven relevance, information architecture, and elegant UX.

Growth & Visibility : Executive exposure and a clear path to broader ownership across discovery and recommendations.

Supportive Package : Competitive salary, bonus program, comprehensive health coverage, retirement plan, generous PTO, and flexible work arrangements.