Senior Manager, Search Platforms & AI

Company Background:

Established in 1928, Genuine Parts Company is a leading global service provider of automotive and industrial replacement parts and value-added solutions. Our Automotive Parts Group operates across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australasia, France, the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Portugal, while our Industrial Parts Group serves customers in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Australasia. We keep the world moving with a vast network of over 10,700 locations spanning 17 countries supported by more than 63,000 teammates. Learn more at genpt.com.

Position Purpose:

Seeking world-class talent to join the world’s leading distributor of automotive and industrial replacement parts and value-added services operating 5,500+ locations and servicing more than 20,000 locations in the U.S and Canada. Specifically, this role will Lead the strategy, engineering, and applied AI capabilities that power search, discovery, and product finding platforms across digital channels. Drive measurable business outcomes through relevance optimization, search platform modernization, machine learning, GenAI, and agentic commerce capabilities.

This is an engineering leadership role with responsibility for implementing the technology strategy and execution for GPC’s unified commerce platforms.

This individual must be a technologist & engineer at heart and be comfortable in understanding the technology direction and being hands on with the execution of the strategy.  They must exhibit a deep understanding of modern technology stack and agile delivery models, demonstrated focus on customer experience, and must have a proven track record of modernizing legacy supply chain technologies at scale.

Close collaboration and alignment with a wide variety of both internal stakeholders and external vendors will be required.  As such, exceptional abilities in building and maintaining strong working relationships and organizational savvy will be required.  High level communication and presentation skills are required. Ability to attract, retain, and develop engineering talent will be critical.

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.

Location:

• GPC has two work locations to choose from, Duluth or Atlanta office.

• We offer a Flexible Work Policy that permits eligible employees to work remotely.

Desired Qualifications & Experiences: 

• 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.

• Must also have 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.

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GPC conducts its business without regard to sex, race, creed, color, religion, marital status, national origin, citizenship status, age, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, disability, military status, status as a veteran, or any other protected characteristic. GPC's policy is to recruit, hire, train, promote, assign, transfer and terminate employees based on their own ability, achievement, experience and conduct and other legitimate business reasons.