Sr. Product Manager (Search Prod. Exp., Retrieval, & Recommendations) Austin or SA, TX

H.E.B.; San Antonio (TX); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

H-E-B is seeking a Senior Product Manager for Search and Product Experience and Retrieval to lead strategy across search, category browse, recommendations, and discovery surfaces. You will own retrieval strategy and partner on shared infrastructure to deliver experiences that boost engagement, basket size, and loyalty.

This role blends business acumen with data-driven decision making in a large-scale ecommerce environment. LOCATION: Austin & San Antonio, TX Hybrid.

Qualifications

• A related degree or comparable formal training, certification, or work experience.
• 5+ years of experience in product management / development related to e-commerce, personalization, search, data/ML products.
• Strong experience shipping cross-platform, data-driven features at scale and iterating based on experimentation.

Responsibilities

• Owns search strategy end-to-end, including category browse, search filters, product availability data, and customer-facing search surfaces. Prioritizes roadmap and manages phasing across quarters.
• Owns retrieval strategy entirely, defining how products surface across all search and category touchpoints. Manages hybrid search, intent classification, and retrieval quality metrics.
• Owns repurchase experience strategy and implementation end to end.
• Manages product data & attributes as a platform capability, ensuring product information and attribution is available, consistent, and actionable across search, recommendations, and merchandised experiences.
• Partners strategically with personalization leadership to ensure recommendations leverage retrieval innovations.
• Collaborates with merchandising, analytics, and engineering to align priorities, business cases, success metrics, and impact.

Skills

Product management

Data-driven decision making

Agile / Scrum

Cross-functional leadership

E-commerce / Retail

A/B testing

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's degree or related

Tools

JIRA

Confluence

Google Analytics

Job description

As a Senior Product Manager for Search and Product Experience and Retrieval, you will lead product strategy and execution across search, category browse, recommendations touchpoints, and discovery surfaces. You will own retrieval strategy, partner with recommendations owners on shared infrastructure, and work with business and technology stakeholders to deliver experiences that improve customer engagement, basket size, and loyalty. Once you're eligible, you'll become an Owner in the company, so we're looking for commitment, hard work, and focus on quality and Customer service. "Partner-owned" means our most important resources – People – drive the innovation, growth, and success that make H-E-B the greatest omnichannel retailing company.

Location: Austin & San Antonio, TX-Hybrid

We are looking for:

Experienced product manager who is curious, empathetic, and data-driven, with strong business acumen related to enterprise organizations and e-commerce/retail at scale, and can apply those skills to the delivery of complex technology solutions for Customers, Merchants, Suppliers, and internal Partners.

What is the work?

Search & Product Experience – Primary Ownership

• Owns search strategy end-to-end, including category browse, search filters, product availability data, and customer-facing search surfaces. Prioritizes roadmap and manages phasing across quarters.
• Owns retrieval strategy entirely, defining how products surface across all search and category touchpoints. Manages hybrid search, intent classification, and retrieval quality metrics.
• Owns repurchase experience strategy and implementation end to end.
• Manages product data & attributes as a platform capability, ensuring product information and attribution is available, consistent, and actionable across search, recommendations, and merchandised experiences. Partners on upstream data availability with merchandising and platform teams and owns the end experience/data activation roadmap.
• Partners strategically with personalization leadership to ensure recommendations leverage retrieval innovations. Coordinates on shared infrastructure and validates that models have the data signals they need
• Supports recommendations and personalization roadmap and models on initiatives affecting shared discovery surfaces. Aligns on metric frameworks and helps communicate features to stakeholders

Cross-Functional Product Execution

• Manages multi-quarter delivery plans, dependencies, blockers, trade-offs, and phasing across cross-functional teams.
• Collaborates with merchandising, retail media, customer lifecycle, growth, engineering, design, data science, and analytics partners to align priorities, business cases, success metrics, and expected customer/business impact.
• Defines measurement strategy for search and retrieval, including quality targets, relevance KPIs, experiment design, A/B testing, and launch recommendations based on results.
• Synthesizes customer research, merchant feedback, search logs, and competitive intelligence into hypotheses, roadmap decisions, specifications, and user stories.
• Leads workshops, mentors junior PMs and analysts, and helps teams resolve ambiguity early.

What is your background?

• A related degree or comparable formal training, certification, or work experience
• 5+ years of experience in product management / development related to e-commerce, personalization, search, data/ML products
• Strong experience shipping cross-platform, data-driven features at scale and iterating based on experimentation

Do you have what it takes to be an H-E-B Senior Product Manager?

• Comprehensive knowledge of voice of the customer techniques and product management tools (e.g., JIRA, Confluence)
• Advanced analytical skills: interpret logs, construct offline evaluation frameworks, run A/B tests, identify quality issues, etc.
• Advanced communication and presentation skills
• Strong Agile / Scrum skills
• Strong negotiating and interpersonal skills: can broker alignment between merchant control, search relevance, and business metrics (revenue/margin) without damaging relationships
• Strong influencing, collaborating, and active listening skills.
• Strong decision-making skills
• Ability to leverage data to tell a meaningful story.
• Ability to break down complex problems into components and reassemble them to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
• Ability to condense complex technical concepts into non-technical language for business stakeholders.
• Ability to affect change, adaptability.
• Motivated to independently achieve results.
• In the search and recommendations space:
  • Comprehensive knowledge of search, retrieval, and discovery fundamentals: keyword matching, semantic/neural retrieval, vector databases, ranking signals, product taxonomy, filtering, faceted search, experimentation, and measurement frameworks
  • Strong understanding of information retrieval (IR) and how retrieval quality impacts downstream experiences; comfortable discussing tradeoffs between keyword precision, semantic recall, and ranking
  • Experience with machine learning / information retrieval teams: understands how data science teams build models, semantic search, fine-tune embeddings, conduct offline evaluation, and measure online performance
  • Nice-to-have: familiarity with query expansion, entity recognition, and personalized ranking in production e-commerce and search contexts

Can you…

• Work collaboratively across a complex enterprise and rapidly evolving business
• Lead through influence rather than authority, coordinating work across ~8–12 cross-functional team members in multiple disciplines
• Manage a roadmap spanning multiple quarters with 10+ major initiatives in different lifecycle phases simultaneously

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