Engineering Manager Catalog📣 Job Ad

About the Role

Salla is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Catalog team to join our full-time operations in Makkah, Makkah Province. This role is central to managing the foundational system that records every product sold on the platform, requiring over 10 years of experience in a relevant engineering leadership capacity.

Role Overview and Impact

This is a critical player-coach position, balancing hands-on technical engagement with leadership responsibilities. The Catalog team is responsible for the product data model, taxonomy, attribution, data quality, and the browse and filtration experience. The quality of catalog data directly influences filtration depth, feed approval, SEO eligibility, and merchant Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV). You will lead through earned authority, built on judgment, consistency, and care, rather than solely through your reporting line.

Product Data and Attribution Responsibilities

• Manage the catalog data model, including products, variants, media, pricing, and availability, ensuring correctness on write and speed on read for merchants with 100k+ SKUs.
• Oversee attribute architecture, encompassing category-scoped schemas, multilingual values, and merchant-defined custom fields.
• Ensure the coexistence of merchant category trees with a canonical platform taxonomy.
• Develop and maintain data quality as a measurable system, including completeness scoring, identifier coverage, and enrichment loops to boost feed approval and conversion.

Filtration and Indexing Responsibilities

• Lead faceted navigation, ensuring accurate counts, category listing performance, and sort/ordering at scale.
• Manage the pipeline from product mutation to searchable document, including event-driven updates, freshness SLAs, and zero-downtime reindexing.
• Define the index contract that relevance is built on, in partnership with the Search team who own query-side ranking.

Leadership and Team Management

• Own the end-to-end hiring process, consistently raising the bar with every offer.
• Develop growth plans tied to the domain's most challenging problems and conduct honest performance management, including difficult conversations.
• Protect the team's focus through predictable scoping and sequencing, and the willingness to decline requests with clear reasons.
• Manage the tech-debt roadmap as a standing capacity allocation, supported by postmortems and engineering health metrics.
• Own incident response and observability for the domain itself, monitoring metrics such as feed rejection rates, index lag, and facet latency, beyond just server health.
• Partner daily with Product, Storefront, Search, and channel-feed teams.

Qualifications and Experience

Candidates must possess over 10 years of experience in engineering leadership roles, demonstrating a strong background in managing complex data systems and leading engineering teams. The role requires the ability to review schemas, challenge query plans, and shape architecture through written RFCs, without directly taking on delivery work.