Senior Product Manager, Search and Discovery
$100,000–$135,000 year
On-siteBrea, California, United States
Job Summary
Own the end-to-end product strategy and roadmap for search and discovery systems, driving improvements in search relevance, click-through rate, conversion rate, and search-driven GMV. Lead development of core capabilities including query understanding, intent recognition, search ranking optimization, autocomplete, personalized recommendations, and search analytics dashboards. Partner closely with Engineering, Data Science, Merchandising, and UX teams to define model objectives, evaluate performance, and translate machine learning capabilities into product features. Establish clear success metrics, conduct root-cause analysis, and ensure strong execution across distributed teams. This role defines product strategy by working backward from targeted business outcomes to enhance customer satisfaction and operational efficiency across Yami's e-commerce platform.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years of product management experience delivering scaled search, discovery, or recommendation systems in e-commerce, marketplace, or content platform environments.
- Deep understanding of search and information retrieval concepts, including query parsing, intent classification, ranking algorithms, indexing, recall and precision trade-offs, and relevance tuning.
- Knowledge of key search and discovery metrics, including CTR, conversion rate, null result rate, MRR (Mean Reciprocal Rank), NDCG (Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain), search exit rate, add-to-cart rate, and search-attributed GMV.
- Strong analytical and structured problem solving: root-cause analysis, clear problem framing, success metrics definition, and translation of insights into system capabilities and operational mechanisms.
- Experience working with machine learning and data science teams to define model objectives, evaluate model performance, and translate ML capabilities into product features.
- Experience influencing multiple stakeholders across engineering, data science, merchandising, and content teams, and driving alignment and decisions.
- Leadership experience in distributed or remote engineering teams, driving execution across time zones and geographies.
- Bilingual written and verbal communication skills in Chinese and English.
Desired Qualifications
- Hands-on experience building or scaling search ranking, query understanding, or recommendation systems.
- Experience with NLP, LLM-powered search, semantic search, vector search, or conversational/agentic shopping experiences (e.g., multi-turn dialogue, intent progression, AI-assisted product discovery).
- Experience with personalization strategies, including user behavior modeling, collaborative filtering, and real-time personalization.
- Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity effectively and identify structural improvements in search and discovery workflows.
- Strong engineering and design judgment: able to partner with Engineering to make sound technical trade-offs and collaborate with UX Design to deliver high-quality user experiences.
- Track record of building data-driven and automated solutions for search relevance optimization, A/B testing frameworks, or search analytics that reduce manual work and improve operational efficiency.
- Strong data fluency with SQL and common analytics/BI tools.
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