Engineering Manager - Search Team (Machine Learning)

As an Engineering Manager for our Search team, you will lead a highly skilled group of machine learning engineers, data scientists, and full-stack software engineers who work across the stack to build the models, services, and user-facing experiences that power Zocdoc’s search. This team plays a critical role in ensuring patients can intuitively find and access the care that’s right for them.

Our mission for 2025 and beyond is ambitious: we are evolving Zocdoc's search experience into an intuitive free-text experience, empowering patients to easily find the exact care they are looking for in their time of need. This will be powered by state-of-the-art embeddings and ranking models. This means we’ll be rethinking our search model architecture from the ground up and working backwards from what patients truly need - whether that’s a better understanding of intent or building new agentic search flows truly personalized to a patient's unique context

You’ll help shape the strategy and execution of this vision, drive engineering excellence, and foster a culture of learning, innovation, and delivery.

• Passionate about software engineering and product development and building scalable, technical solutions for end-users 
• Passionate about leveraging machine learning to solve real world problems that positively affect millions of people 
• Willing and eager to learn, including hands on development to guide and set an example for your team
• A leader who enjoys inspiring, supporting, and influencing their teams to do their best work with a focus on accountability, velocity, and continuous improvement
• A strong collaborator with excellent communication skills who enjoys being the bridge between engineering, product, and internal stakeholders, being able to communicate complex ML terminology effectively to various stakeholders
• A believer that diverse and inclusive teams and cultures are non-negotiable

• Lead and grow a high-performing team of ML engineers, data scientists, and software engineers focused on improving Zocdoc’s search experience
• Partner closely with Product, Design and Analytics to define the future of search, including semantic query understanding, ranking improvements, and agentic flows
• Liaise with senior and executive engineering leaders to shape and scale the future of ML strategy at Zocdoc
• Drive development of our embedding-based retrieval and ranking infrastructure, ensuring high performance, reliability, and ML experimentation velocity
• Coach the team through the full ML lifecycle—from research and prototyping to robust productionization
• Guide engineers through technical tradeoffs, architectural decisions, and implementation details
• Ensure that all systems are developed with attention to security, performance, scale, and uptime
  

• 3+ years of experience as an individual contributor in the ML space and 3+ years of experience as a people manager leading teams of 6+
• A proven track record of leading machine learning teams responsible for delivering consumer-facing products at scale
• A deep understanding of the ML development lifecycle, including hypothesis generation, experimentation, offline evaluation, feature engineering, and production deployment—whether through hands-on experience or by directly managing teams
• Solid software engineering fundamentals and experience operating in cloud-based microservices environments (AWS preferred)
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence technical direction and align cross-functional stakeholders
• A product-oriented mindset with a passion for applying ML to real-world problems that impact millions of users. You seek to deeply understand the business and product context behind the roadmap and the ML models, and you use that insight to guide the team toward delivering meaningful outcomes.
• A growth mindset, humility, and a strong sense of ownership and accountability
  

• Experience managing teams responsible for low-latency inference systems already in production
• Prior ownership of search or information retrieval products, especially those involving semantic interfaces, or embedding-based ranking and candidate generation
• You have experience leading large multidisciplinary teams (~8-10), including machine learning engineers, data scientists, and software engineers

Benefits:

• Flexible, hybrid work environment at our convenient Soho location
• Unlimited Vacation
• 100% paid employee health benefit options (including medical, dental, and vision)
• Commuter Benefits
• 401(k) with employer funded match
• Corporate wellness programs with Headspace and Peloton
• Sabbatical leave (for employees with 5+ years of service)
• Competitive paid parental leave and fertility/family planning reimbursement
• Cell phone reimbursement
• Catered lunch everyday along with beverages and snacks
• Employee Resource Groups and ZocClubs to promote shared community and belonging
• Great Place to Work Certified