Engineering Manager, Catalog Team

We're hiring an Engineering Manager for the Catalog team — the system of record for every product sold on the platform. The team owns the product data model, taxonomy and attribution, data quality, and the browse and filtration experience that turns catalog data into discovery. This is a player-coach role. You'll manage a team of engineers — hiring, growing, and holding the bar — while staying hands-on enough to review schemas, challenge query plans, and shape architecture through written RFCs rather than by taking delivery work yourself. Catalog reads sit on the hottest path of every storefront request, and catalog data quality directly drives filtration depth, feed approval, SEO eligibility, and merchant GMV. You'll be expected to lead through earned authority: influence built on judgment, consistency, and care — not the reporting line.

What You'll Own
Product Data & Attribution

• The catalog data model — products, variants, media, pricing, availability — correct on write, fast on read, at the scale of merchants running 100k+ SKUs on shared infrastructure
• Attribute architecture: category-scoped schemas, multilingual values, merchant-defined custom fields
• Coexistence of merchant category trees with a canonical platform taxonomy
• Data quality as a measurable system: completeness scoring, identifier coverage, enrichment loops that lift feed approval and conversion

Filtration & Indexing

• Faceted navigation with accurate counts, category listing performance, sort/ordering at scale
• The pipeline from product mutation to searchable document — event-driven updates, freshness SLAs, zero-downtime reindexing
• The index contract that relevance is built on, in partnership with the Search team (who own query-side ranking)

What You'll Manage

• Own hiring end-to-end; raise the bar with every offer
• Build growth plans tied to the domain's hardest problems; run honest performance management, difficult conversations included
• Protect the team's focus — predictable scoping and sequencing, and the willingness to say no with reasons
• Own the tech-debt roadmap as a standing capacity allocation, backed by postmortems and engineering health metrics
• Own incident response and observability of the domain itself — feed rejection rates, index lag, facet latency, not just server health
• Partner daily with Product, Storefront, Search, and channel-feed teams

Requirements
Must-have:

• 8+ years in software engineering with 3+ years managing engineers — and evidence of people outcomes: engineers you hired, grew, and promoted, and performance you managed honestly.
• Deep backend and relational-database expertise at scale: schema design, indexing strategy, query-plan analysis, and safe migrations on large, hot tables.
• Production ownership of search/discovery infrastructure — OpenSearch/Elasticsearch or Algolia-class platforms — powering catalog browse or filtration at real scale.
• E-commerce or marketplace catalog depth: taxonomy design, variant/attribute modeling, and product feed ecosystems.

Nice to have:

• PHP/Laravel and MySQL specifically (our stack) — or clear evidence you go deep in a new stack quickly.
• Multi-tenant SaaS experience: tenant isolation, per-tenant limits, noisy-neighbor mitigation.
• Arabic-language data awareness (normalization, mixed-script content) and RTL product thinking.
• Google Merchant Center and structured-data/SEO experience.
• Redis and edge caching for high-read paths, including invalidation design.