Director, Product Management (AI Search)

The Mission

Empower developers and business users with the tools to maximize their use of Algolia’s Search platform. Our team builds advanced analytics, debugging tools, and applications that enhance keyword search capabilities, helping customers make data-driven decisions.

The Opportunity

The Search team at Algolia runs the world’s fastest and most relevant search engine. We operate one platform that covers ALL retrieval methods - keyword, semantic, db, and others. We eat, breathe, and sleep highly available and highly reliable services (4 9s is our minimum threshold). We build products that enable anyone to easily connect any data source and retrieve and collate content across multiple data sources.  We inform our customers how best to optimize their discovery engines through automation and products. We run both the public cloud and our own bare metal because we demand the best performance. And, we are just getting started. 

The Team

Our AI Search team is a remote-first, multicultural group committed to innovation and inclusion. We focus on three key areas of search: Understanding, Ranking, and Retrieval. We are looking for a Product Leader to drive the long-term vision and execution of AI Search.

Your Role

As Director of Product for AI Search, you will operate at the intersection of customer value, technical systems, product strategy, and execution. Translating deep search capabilities into products customers understand, adopt, and trust. You will:

• Define and communicate the strategy, vision, and roadmap for AI Search, working closely with the Executive Leadership Team.
• Develop a deep understanding of customer needs, search trends, and emerging technologies to guide product direction.
• Align closely with go-to-market teams to drive feature adoption and continuously refine our offerings based on customer feedback.
• Partner with engineering and machine learning teams to develop technical product specifications and integrations.
• Foster a culture of agility and innovation, promoting rapid prototyping and iterative learning.
• Assess product development progress, identify enhancement opportunities, and ensure continuous improvement.
• Manage budgets, forecasts, and key performance metrics.
• Identify market trends, competitive positioning, and potential strategic partnerships.
• Build and lead a world-class team of product managers.

You might be a great fit if you have:

• Proven experience in technical B2B product management, ideally in search, AI search, retrieval systems, recommendation systems, data platforms, or API-driven infrastructure products.
• Strong hands-on understanding of modern search systems, including retrieval, ranking, relevance tuning, query understanding, indexing, filtering, faceting, and evaluation.
• Familiarity with AI/ML-powered search approaches such as semantic search, vector search, hybrid retrieval, learning-to-rank, personalisation, reranking, embeddings, or LLM-powered search experiences.
• Leadership experience managing and scaling product management teams.
• A track record of successfully shipping and iterating on products in an agile development environment.
• The ability to translate complex technical challenges into strategic business solutions.
• Experience engaging with high-profile customers, including presenting roadmaps and gathering feedback.
• Strong organisational skills, with the ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced startup environment.
• Hands-on expertise with search engines, real-time APIs, and AI/ML-powered products.