Engineering Manager - Search Team (Machine Learning)

Our Mission

Healthcare should work for patients, but it doesn’t. In their time of need, they call down outdated insurance directories. Then wait on hold. Then wait weeks for the privilege of a visit. Then wait in a room solely designed for waiting. Then wait for a surprise bill. In any other consumer industry, the companies delivering such a poor customer experience would not survive. But in healthcare, patients lack market power. Which means they are expected to accept the unacceptable.

 

Zocdoc’s mission is to give power to the patient. To do that, we’ve built the leading healthcare marketplace that makes it easy to find and book in-person or virtual care in all 50 states, across +200 specialties and +12k insurance plans. By giving patients the ability to see and choose, we give them power. In doing so, we can make healthcare work like every other consumer sector, where businesses compete for customers, not the other way around. In time, this will drive quality up and prices down. 

 

We’re 18 years old and the leader in our space, but we are still just getting started. If you like solving important, complex problems alongside deeply thoughtful, driven, and collaborative teammates, read on.

 

Your Impact on Our Mission

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.

You’ll enjoy this role if you are…

• 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

Your Day-to-Day is…

• 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
  

You’ll Be Successful in This Role If You Have…

• 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 producti