Director, Capability Engineering – Search, Personalization & Recommendation - CDH - Remote

Mayo Clinic•Rochester, MN

6h•Remote

About The Position

The Director, Capability Engineering-Search, Personalization & Recommendation will lead enterprise-wide digital innovation, product delivery, experience design, and security operations across Mayo Clinic’s integrated systems. This role is pivotal in advancing Mayo’s digital transformation strategy while ensuring excellence in end-user experience, governance, brand consistency, and operational agility. The Director will collaborate across clinical, technical, design, and business functions to drive strategic outcomes through innovation, technology leadership, and multidisciplinary team engagement. The role includes ownership of complex digital initiatives, leading teams of experts in their respective domains, and ensuring digital solutions align with enterprise values, compliance frameworks, and human-centered design principles. Digital Product and Platform Leadership: Lead the full product lifecycle: strategy, prioritization, development, deployment, and evolution. Ensure alignment between business strategy, clinical operations, and end-user needs. Apply Agile methodologies to deliver scalable, high-impact digital solutions. Translate user insights into actionable roadmaps that shape clinical and consumer-facing platforms. Familiarity with regulatory standards (e.g., HIPAA, WCAG), especially in healthcare settings. Experience Design and Research: Champion a culture of user-centricity and evidence-based decision-making. Lead persona development, journey mapping, and usability testing efforts. Oversee the execution and maturation of experience design research methodologies, tools, and process standardization. Apply service design principles to identify friction points and inform optimization strategies. Design Systems and Content Strategy: Oversee governance and scalability of enterprise-wide design systems and UX standards. Drive creation and maintenance of reusable UI components, accessibility standards, and brand guidelines. Collaborate with engineers and designers to ensure a consistent and inclusive digital presence. Develop content strategy frameworks to support institutional communication and engagement. Information Security Leadership: Partner with technical teams and compliance leaders to guide cybersecurity priorities. Provide governance for enterprise information security policies and tools. Support incident response and risk mitigation activities with tactical leadership. Promote a culture of data stewardship, awareness, and proactive threat response. Team Leadership and Organizational Development: Track record of innovation in complex, matrixed environments. Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity and lead through change. Build and nurture high-performing, diverse teams across geographies and disciplines. Mentor and develop team members, instilling accountability and innovation. Establish measurable goals, support professional development, and promote collaboration. Drive operational excellence through structure, planning, and transparency. Team Leadership and Organizational Development: Track record of innovation in complex, matrixed environments. Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity and lead through change. Build and nurture high-performing, diverse teams across geographies and disciplines. Mentor and develop team members, instilling accountability and innovation. Establish measurable goals, support professional development, and promote collaboration. Drive operational excellence through structure, planning, and transparency. This role will lead a team of approximately 30+ engineers and manage the delivery and operations of capabilities that will be used by several product teams across CDH and potentially across the enterprise.

Requirements

Familiarity with regulatory standards (e.g., HIPAA, WCAG), especially in healthcare settings.
Track record of innovation in complex, matrixed environments.
Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity and lead through change.
Search Algorithms & Indexing: Deep understanding of information retrieval, inverted indexes, ranking algorithms, and relevance tuning.
Search Platforms: Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch, Solr, or similar search engines.
Query Optimization: Expertise in query parsing, boosting, faceting, and handling large-scale search queries efficiently.
Recommendation Algorithms: Strong knowledge of collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, and hybrid approaches.
Personalization Techniques: Experience with user profiling, behavioral analytics, and context-aware recommendations.
Machine Learning for Recommendations: Familiarity with deep learning models for personalization (e.g., embeddings, neural collaborative filtering).
Experience with feature engineering, model deployment, and monitoring in production environments.
Knowledge of A/B testing frameworks for evaluating recommendation performance.
Strong skills in Python, Java, or Scala for backend and ML development.
Familiarity with ML libraries (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-learn) and search APIs.
Understanding of distributed systems and high-performance architectures.
Proficiency in cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) for hosting search and recommendation services.
Experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) or similar technologies
Proven experience in leading engineering teams focused on AI-driven personalization and search.
Driving innovation in user experience through intelligent recommendations and personalized content.

Responsibilities

Lead the full product lifecycle: strategy, prioritization, development, deployment, and evolution.
Ensure alignment between business strategy, clinical operations, and end-user needs.
Apply Agile methodologies to deliver scalable, high-impact digital solutions.
Translate user insights into actionable roadmaps that shape clinical and consumer-facing platforms.
Lead persona development, journey mapping, and usability testing efforts.
Oversee the execution and maturation of experience design research methodologies, tools, and process standardization.
Apply service design principles to identify friction points and inform optimization strategies.
Oversee governance and scalability of enterprise-wide design systems and UX standards.
Drive creation and maintenance of reusable UI components, accessibility standards, and brand guidelines.
Collaborate with engineers and designers to ensure a consistent and inclusive digital presence.
Develop content strategy frameworks to support institutional communication and engagement.
Partner with technical teams and compliance leaders to guide cybersecurity priorities.
Provide governance for enterprise information security policies and tools.
Support incident response and risk mitigation activities with tactical leadership.
Promote a culture of data stewardship, awareness, and proactive threat response.
Build and nurture high-performing, diverse teams across geographies and disciplines.
Mentor and develop team members, instilling accountability and innovation.
Establish measurable goals, support professional development, and promote collaboration.
Drive operational excellence through structure, planning, and transparency.
Manage the delivery and operations of capabilities that will be used by several product teams across CDH and potentially across the enterprise.