Engineering Manager - Recommendations

As an Engineering Manager, you will lead the team behind Truecaller's Recommendations and adVantage, our AI-powered performance advertising platform. It is a multi-disciplinary team of ML engineers, data scientists, backend engineers, and data engineers building the retrieval, ranking, and contextual-bandit systems, and the real-time serving and data infrastructure beneath them, that decides what Truecaller recommends and shows to hundreds of millions of users. The role sits at the intersection of technical depth and people leadership: you will set direction across an applied-ML stack, keep a highly specialized team healthy and growing, and turn a research-heavy roadmap into shipped, reliable systems.

What you'll do:

• Lead, grow, and retain a high-performing team of ML engineers, data scientists, backend engineers, and data engineers, investing deliberately in each person's development and career path.
• Set technical direction across the recommendation and advertising ML stack - retrieval, ranking, contextual bandits, and conversion modeling - along with the real-time serving and data platforms that support them.
• Own team planning, prioritization, and delivery, balancing near-term product and campaign commitments against long-term platform health.
• Partner closely with product, data science, and other engineering teams to translate business goals - revenue, engagement, advertiser outcomes - into a clear technical roadmap.
• Push for reuse: config-driven, composable platforms and closed feedback loops rather than one-off models and pipelines.
• Drive rigor in experimentation and evaluation, from offline metrics to online A/B tests, so model changes ship on measured impact.
• Keep production systems reliable at scale, owning the latency, quality, and cost of models serving hundreds of millions of users.
• Run regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations, and recruit and onboard new talent as the team grows.
• Stay close enough to the technical detail to make informed calls, unblock your team, and earn credibility with senior ML and backend engineers.

What you bring in:

• Proven experience leading or managing engineering or ML teams, ideally in recommendations, ranking, ads, search, or a similarly ML-heavy domain.
• A solid grasp of applied ML in production - retrieval and ranking, experimentation, model serving, and the data that feeds them - enough to engage credibly on technical trade-offs. You do not need to be the strongest modeler in the room; you need to lead the people who are.
• Working knowledge of backend and data engineering practices - architecture, real-time systems, pipelines, and warehousing - enough to reason about the full stack your team owns.
• Strong leadership and communication skills, with the ability to align specialists with different skill sets toward shared goals.
• A track record of delivering complex technical projects on time and at scale.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and making pragmatic trade-offs between speed and quality.
• A collaborative mindset and the ability to work closely with cross-functional stakeholders.

It would be great if you also have:

• A hands-on background in ML engineering, data science, or backend development before moving into management.
• Experience with recommender systems, contextual bandits or reinforcement learning, or performance advertising and ad-serving systems.
• Familiarity with large-scale data and ML platforms (Spark, Kafka, Airflow, feature stores, model serving).
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred; AWS or Azure also fine).
• Experience scaling teams in a high-growth tech environment.

What we offer:

• A comprehensive compensation package: We offer a competitive salary, 30 days of paid vacation, private health insurance, parental leave top-up, pension, and wellness contributions.
• Modern tools to do your best work: Choose your preferred computer and phone within our budget, so you can work comfortably and efficiently.
• A people-focused office culture: We value in-person collaboration and follow an office-first model, with some flexibility. Our offices offer a vibrant environment with opportunities to learn, connect, and recharge, from breakfast, lunch, and well-stocked snack stations and quiet spaces to team activities such as movie nights, tech meetups, and cultural events. There's something for everyone.
• Truecaller’s “Lab Days” offer a space for imagination: 5 times per year for 3 days, where everyone steps away from their normal tasks to explore new, bold ideas and build things they’ve always wanted to. It’s a space where curiosity leads the way, and prototypes take shape. Some concepts even make it into production, and a few have grown into real features used by millions today. Lab Days allow you to be creative, learn fast, and help shape Truecaller's future.

Sounds like a great opportunity?

We will fill the position as soon as we find the right candidate, so please send your application as soon as possible. As part of the recruitment process, we will conduct a background check.