Senior Backend Engineering Manager, Recommendations

Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 6-8 engineers building recommendation services Partner with ML to productionize recommendation models and ensure low-latency, high-availability serving infrastructure Own the technical roadmap for the recommender platform, balancing new capabilities with reliability and performance improvements Drive architecture decisions for recommendation and search infrastructure Establish and maintain engineering standards for code quality, testing, observability, and incident response Collaborate with Product, Design, and cross-functional engineering teams to define and deliver product-facing recommendation features Manage hiring, performance reviews, career development, and team culture 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 4+ years in an engineering management role Strong backend systems expertise - you've built or operated large-scale distributed systems in production Experience with recommendation systems, search ranking, personalization, or adjacent ML-serving infrastructure Proficiency in one or more backend languages (ideally Go) Familiarity with data processing architectures, feature stores, and model-serving technologies (e.g., Kafka, Spark, ElasticSearch, etc) Track record of hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing engineering teams Ability to communicate technical trade-offs clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders Experience with ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch) or MLOps tooling (MLflow, Kubeflow, Airflow) Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (Kubernetes) Background in A/B testing and experimentation platforms Prior work at scale (millions of daily active users or equivalent throughput)