Engineering Manager - Search (Consumer, Global Discovery)

As the world’s pioneering local delivery platform, our mission is to deliver an amazing experience, fast, easy, and to your door. We operate in over 70+ countries worldwide, powered by tech, designed by people. As one of Europe’s largest tech platforms, headquartered in Berlin, Germany. Delivery Hero has been listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since 2017 and is part of the MDAX stock market index. We enable creative minds to deliver solutions that create impact within our ecosystem. We move fast, take action and adapt. No matter where you're from or what you believe in, we build, we deliver, we lead. We are Delivery Hero.

We are on the lookout for an Engineering Manager to lead one of our squads within the Search Domain. This squad builds and owns some of the core services that power search and discovery. 

These are low-latency services handling tens of thousands of queries per second across multiple markets. They must remain fast, and continuously improve in relevance. Your squad will own the full lifecycle of these services: design, build, operate, and iterate.

In this role, you will guide a team of engineers, own the quality and operational health of your services, and partner closely with Product and Data Science to deliver measurable improvements to the search experience.

Lead & Grow a High-Performing Squad

• Own team health, engagement, and inclusion, ensuring every engineer has growth opportunities and clear career paths.

• Develop engineers through regular 1:1s, structured feedback, clear expectations, and performance management.

• Hire and onboard talent with strong backend and search infrastructure skills, while contributing to domain-wide recruiting efforts.

Own Technical and Delivery Outcomes

• Experience delivering Conversational Search or LLM-powered search interfaces.

• Lead your team in delivering high-quality, maintainable services in a Java 

• Drive Agentic Engineering adoption and a transformation towards fully Agentic SDLC.

• Ensure reliable sprint execution, proactive risk management, and transparent stakeholder communication. Manage cross-squad dependencies.

Drive Operational Excellence

• Maintain the reliability of services through robust monitoring, alerting, and incident response. 

• Ensure on-call readiness, runbooks, and blameless post-mortems are part of the squad's culture.

• Continuously improve delivery and operational health: cycle time, deployment frequency, safe reindexing rollouts, and relevance regression detection.

Partner with Product & Data Science to Deliver Impact

• Translate product discovery goals and relevance targets into actionable engineering work with clear priorities.

• Collaborate with Data Science on experiments and A/B tests to measure relevance improvements (MRR, NDCG, click-through rates).

• Keep the squad aligned with business objectives and user value—ensuring improvements translate into measurable customer impact.

We are looking for a candidate with strong leadership experience and a solid understanding of search and LLM systems.

Search Technical Fluency: You are comfortable working with backend engineers in Go, Java, or Python who build search infrastructure. You understand the fundamentals of search—inverted indexes, vector search, query parsing, relevance scoring—well enough to guide your team's architectural choices, review designs, and make sound engineering trade-offs. Experience with leveraging LLMs for search improvement, or driving conversational search projects is also a plus.

Agentic Engineering Best Practices: You have hands-on experience with Agentic Engineering and you are able to drive a transformation of the SDLC from traditional to fully Agentic. This improves the baseline code quality, decreases time to market and empowers the engineers to focus on higher-level problem solving and architecture.

Delivery & Operational Maturity: You know how to run a predictable delivery process, manage cross-team dependencies, and ensure service reliability for low-latency, high-throughput systems. You are experienced with monitoring, on-call practices, and incident management—and you understand what it takes to safely roll out changes, and detect regressions in production.

Strong People Leadership: You have experience mentoring engineers, fostering inclusion, giving structured feedback, and building a positive, productive team environment. You know how to grow engineers into senior technical roles and create a culture of ownership.

Ensuring you and all our Heroes are looked after, happy, and healthy is always on the menu. Because if you’re in good shape, then we’re in good shape.

• Make the most of our hybrid working model and join the team for face-to-face connection and collaboration in our beautiful Berlin campus 2 days a week

• We offer 27 days holiday with an extra day on 2nd and 3rd year of service

• We will support you in developing yourself and your career growth opportunities: 1.000 € Educational Budget, Language Courses, Parental Support and access to the Udemy Business platform to explore a variety of online courses.

• Get moving and release those wonderful, mind-boosting endorphins: Health Checkups, Meditation, Yoga, Gym & Bicycle Subsidy

• Cash. Dough. Cheddar. Whatever you call it, we’ll help you with it: Employee Share Purchase Plan, Sabbatical Bank,  Public Transportation Ticket Discount, Life & Accident Insurance, Corporate Pension Plan

• The power of getting together over some food is unrivaled. Here are a few ways to help you do that. All the yum: Digital Meal Vouchers, Food Vouchers, Corporate Discounts. Courses.

We believe diversity and inclusion are key to creating not only an exciting product, but also an amazing customer and employee experience. Fostering this starts with hiring - therefore we do not discriminate on the basis of racial identities, religious beliefs, color, national origin, gender identities or expressions, sexual orientations, age, marital or disability statuses, or any other aspect that makes you, you.

We encourage you to let us know if you need any accommodations or specific accessibility support to ensure a smooth interview experience—just let us know with an email to our Inclusion Officer at [email protected] it in your application.

Severely disabled applicants with equal qualifications will be given preferential consideration.

You're welcome to share your pronouns (he/she/they) right from the start so we can address you respectfully from our first contact.