Staff Product Manager - Search

Job Title: Staff Product Manager - Search

Department, Level: Viewer Experience, X31

Location: Onsite, Bangalore

Work Type: Full time

Job Summary: As a Staff Product Manager for JioHotstar’s Search, you'll work closely with senior product and engineering peers to shape a product strategy that drives measurable improvements in query understanding, ranking, search personalisation, cold start and content discovery across JioHotstar's 500M+ user base. You will own the core search experience end-to-end - from the search zero page, query understanding, ranking to results presentation and query-assist surfaces (pills, suggestions, spell-correct). Drawing on data, experimentation, and deep NLP/ML product instincts, you will identify gaps in query coverage and relevance, translate them into clear product requirements, and work with ML and engineering to ship improvements that move search success and engagement metrics at scale.

About the Team: 

At JioHotstar, we're on a mission to deliver delightful experiences to our 500+ million customers across the globe. Our technology spans multiple countries. The Search team sits within the Viewer Experience org and is responsible for helping every user find exactly what they're looking for through a state-of-the-art search experience.

We blend world-class engineering, ML, design, and data to deliver a fast, relevant search experience at massive scale. If you're passionate about building intelligent search and query-understanding systems that measurably improve how hundreds of millions of users discover content, join us in shaping the future of content discovery.

Key responsibilities

• Conduct thorough research and analysis on query logs, search relevance, and content discovery gaps to generate actionable insights and determine ROI of search investments.

• Translate abstract problem statements into clear requirements by assessing query intent, retrieval & ranking model performance, and catalog coverage.

• Own and evolve the query understanding, search ranking & relevance roadmap, and influence roadmaps within and outside the Search team to enhance the broader discovery ecosystem, including integrating Search insights with Recommendations. .

• Collaborate effectively with ML Engineering, Data Science, and Platform teams, contributing to roadmaps and prioritisation decisions beyond in the search domain.

• Show agility in responding to external signals like content launches, live sports events, and seasonal shifts, enabling swift roadmap adjustments and ensuring transparent communication of downstream impacts on search quality.

• Take ownership of key KPIs that directly aligns with Organisation Objectives and Key Results.

• Develop deep expertise & drive strategic advancements through innovation and transformation.

Skills and attributes for success:

• Communicate clearly and effectively, with precise articulation and logical progression of ideas, equally comfortable writing ML-facing product requirements and presenting search strategy to senior leadership.

• Apply structured frameworks and logical thinking to address complex query-understanding problems, asking the right questions to determine whether an issue is rooted in data quality, model behaviour, or product definition.

• Demonstrate the ability to bridge business problems and ML solutions, translating user and product goals into well-scoped problem formulations, and conversely, grounding algorithmic improvements in measurable business or user outcomes.

• Demonstrate sufficient understanding of ML and NLP fundamentals, including how ranking and query-understanding models are trained, evaluated, and deployed, to have substantive technical conversations with Data Scientists and ML Engineers, challenge assumptions, and make informed prioritisation decisions.

• Leverage a data-driven mindset to derive insights from query logs and metrics and make well-informed product decisions.

• Show strong user empathy, using structured problem-solving to address pain points across various user cohorts through hypothesis-building and solution development. 

• Have a strong customer experience understanding to build and shape what the Search experience looks like for users across Mobile and Large Screen devices. 

• Benchmark competitors and validate findings through experimentation, maintaining high standards for product roadmap inclusion.

• Confidently tackle ambiguous problems with minimal supervision, taking decisive action across the organization.

• Communicate clearly and effectively, with precise articulation and logical progression of ideas, equally comfortable writing ML-facing product requirements and presenting recommendation strategy to senior leadership

• Apply structured frameworks and logical thinking to address complex personalisation problems, asking the right questions to determine whether an issue is rooted in data quality, model behaviour, or product definition

• Demonstrate the ability to bridge business problems and ML solutions, translating user and product goals into well-scoped ML problem formulations, and conversely, grounding algorithmic improvements in measurable business or user outcomes

• Demonstrate sufficient understanding of ML fundamentals, including how recommendation models are trained, evaluated, and deployed, to have substantive technical conversations with Data Scientists and ML Engineers, challenge assumptions, and make informed prioritisation decisions

Preferred education and experience: 

• Bachelors/Masters degree or equivalent preferred. Minimum 7+ years of experience with at least 5 years of experience in product management

• At least 2 years owning ML / search / recommendation products at consumer scale, with a demonstrable track record of shipping measurable metric improvements, not just features.

• Fluency in the ML product lifecycle: feature engineering, A/B experiment design, metric interpretation, and launch readiness is a bonus. 

About JioStar

Perched at the nucleus of spellbinding content and innovative technology, JioStar is a leading global media & entertainment company that is reimagining the way audiences consume entertainment and sports. Its television network and streaming service together reach more than 750 million viewers every week, igniting the dreams and aspirations of hundreds of million people across geographies.

JioStar is an equal opportunity employer. The company values diversity and its mission is to create a workplace where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work. The company ensures that the work environment is free from any discrimination against persons with disabilities, gender, gender identity and any other characteristics or status that is legally protected.