Sr. Manager, Unified Search Platform

JOB SUMMARY

Are you a creative thinker who loves to be on the cutting edge, solving problems through innovative technology solutions? Are you passionate about search, customer strategy, digital design, and platform development?  

Marriott’s Unified Search Platform (USP) team is focused on delivering the future of search for the world’s largest hotelier and is working towards our goal of becoming the world’s favorite travel company. Reporting to the Director, USP, this role will spearhead and drive forward the activation of Marriott’s enterprise-wide search platform for a variety of use cases.

 

The team’s work involves building and advancing the search engine (Lucidworks Fusion) that underpins a variety of search experiences on Marriott.com, including hotel, restaurant, and offers search, as well as powering front-end components across the website via recommendation services. In this role, the Sr. Manager, USP will gain exposure to the challenges of working at immense scale and the complexities of leveraging and integrating LLMs and generative AI in an enterprise environment.  

This role will help to oversee our cross-functional agile team’s development efforts, collaborating with the USP development team to ensure alignment with business requirements. The Sr. Manager, USP will provide guidance on best practices for solution design and contribute to decision-making processes. This role will also collaborate with the testing team to develop and execute comprehensive test plans. Ensure that functional solutions undergo rigorous testing to meet quality standards. 

This Sr. Manager, USP will partner with product teams, engineering, commerce and digital leaders across Marriott International to capture business requirements, define objectives, and drive a capability and feature development roadmap for USP. This will help our team activate against each aspect of that roadmap and enable our “platform as a product” approach to development and produce a world class backlog of features and enhancements. 

 

CANDIDATE PROFILE 

 

Education and Experience

• BA/BS in Business Administration, Computer Science, or a relevant/related major or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of experience in creating functional design documents and leading design sessions 
• 3+ years of experience in digital product roles, with a focus on project management (onshore and offshore)
• Experience working in an agile/scrum software development environment
• Experience interpreting business objectives and translating them into KPIs, roadmaps and product features / enhancements
• Vendor/service provider management experience 

 

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience implementing or managing site search in ecommerce or hospitality verticals
• Engineering background and/or flexibility to learn data call flows, data layers, service caching, APIs, and other aspects of solution architecture
• Effective written and oral communication skills, especially between technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Strong interpersonal skills and the capability to build relationships at all levels of an organization
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Desire to work on a high-performing team and in a results-oriented culture
• Thrives in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial environment

 

CORE WORK ACTIVITIES 

• Help define and execute against business objectives and functional strategies, ensuring alignment with overall project goals.
• Translate business requirements into functional specifications, ensuring clarity and feasibility.
• Identify new platform opportunities to drive better customer experiences and increase incremental revenue from the search platform.
• Guide the functional team, foster a collaborative and innovative work environment for both onshore and offshore teams. 
• Provide guidance on best practices for solution design and contribute to decision-making processes. Assist in the deployment planning process, providing onshore support to ensure smooth transitions and user adoption.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to address any post-deployment issues and optimize functional performance. 

 

Managing Work, Projects, and Policies 

• This individual will embody the ‘servant leader’ mindset and create/foster relationships that achieve business outcomes.
• Provides accurate estimates as to needed time to complete work to feed project plans (and therefore personal deadlines).
• Meets deadlines once agreed upon, provides regular status updates to manager, leadership and key stakeholders. 
• Successfully manages multiple assignments at once; works based on priorities and requests cla