Senior Manager, Search Platforms & AI

Genuine Parts Company•Jacksonville, FL

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Genuine Parts Company (GPC) is seeking a Senior Manager, Search Platforms & AI to lead the strategy, engineering, and applied AI capabilities that power search, discovery, and product finding platforms across digital channels. This role will drive measurable business outcomes through relevance optimization, search platform modernization, machine learning, GenAI, and agentic commerce capabilities. This is an engineering leadership role responsible for implementing the technology strategy and execution for GPC’s unified commerce platforms. The ideal candidate is a technologist and engineer at heart, comfortable with technology direction and hands-on execution. They must possess a deep understanding of modern technology stacks and agile delivery models, a demonstrated focus on customer experience, and a proven track record of modernizing legacy supply chain technologies at scale. Close collaboration with internal stakeholders and external vendors is essential, requiring exceptional relationship-building skills and organizational savvy. High-level communication and presentation skills, along with the ability to attract, retain, and develop engineering talent, are critical.

Requirements

Degree in computer science/engineering or equivalent experience
10+ years’ experience in software engineering delivery (including 3+ years in leadership role)
Consistent track record of leadership, teamwork, and delivering high impact results.
Extensive experience building enterprise grade systems/applications supporting business priorities.
Experience managing 25+ FTE team of internal and extended delivery resources.
Experience in leading leaders.
Ability to effectively share technical information, communicate technical issues and solutions to all levels of business.
Ability to attract, motivate and retain world-class IT talent.
Able to juggle multiple projects - can identify primary and secondary objectives, prioritize time, and communicate timeline to team members.
Experience in understanding of Information Retrieval, Search Relevance, Ranking Systems, Recommendations, and Personalization.
Broad and deep technical understanding of the technologies in this field, including but not limited to Familiarity with search technologies such as Elasticsearch, Apache Solr, Google Cloud Retail Search, vector search platforms, and ML ecosystems.
Strong knowledge of APIs, microservices, distributed systems, and data engineering.
Experience in GenAI, LLMs, Graph RAG, agentic workflows, and conversational commerce.
Experience with semantic search, vector databases, embeddings, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and LLM-powered experiences.
Experience in designing event driven mechanisms, publish/subscribe models.
Experience with cloud computing on at-least one of major providers (Google Cloud Platform, AWS or Azure).
Experience working with modern SQL / noSQL Databases.

Responsibilities

Partner with Product and cross-functional GPC teams to define and execute a vision for AI-powered search that improves conversion, revenue, and customer productivity.
Implement the technology platforms architecture and execute on roadmap to support build out the new commerce related capabilities needed for the unified commerce strategy.
Lead the engineering teams responsible for search platform architecture, scalability, reliability, and performance.
Drive modernization of search infrastructure leveraging cloud-native and AI-enabled technologies.
Build and scale Search Science capabilities including relevance tuning, ranking models, semantic search, vector search, recommendations, and personalization.
Responsible for delivery and support of the platform.
Lead multiple pods and manage engineering managers.
Partner with peer leaders to accelerate and embed agile methodologies across the organization to increase customer-backed problem solving, to increase pace of solution delivery, to accelerate innovation and to enhance cross-functional collaboration.
Recruit, manage, and motivate a team of engineers and Engineering managers to develop best-in-class solutions.
Other duties as assigned.