Principal Product Manager, Search

Job Description

This role will be based in New York, San Francisco or Mountain View.

At LinkedIn, our approach to flexible work is centered on trust and optimized for culture, connection, clarity, and the evolving needs of our business. The work location of this role is hybrid, meaning it will be performed both from home and from a LinkedIn office on select days, as determined by the business needs of the team.

Our mission.  As we enter the biggest transformation of work of our lifetime, the majority of the jobs on this planet will change over the next few years. Figuring out how humans will find their path, and earn a living, is the most important problem in the world right now, and that’s what we’re trying to solve on LinkedIn Search: our mission is to connect every professional to the right people, knowledge, and opportunities. 

What this role is: this role will own the end-to-end AI ranking for people and company search, helping members quickly find the professionals and organizations most relevant to their goals. This role is absolutely critical to LinkedIn’s business (search is used by hundreds of millions of people), and is essential in helping our members achieve their goals.

What you’ll do: in this role, you’ll have the opportunity to build the future of search by combining the foundations of world-class search ranking with the latest advances in AI. You’ll go deep on query and content understanding, lexical and embedding-based retrieval, and multi-stage ranking, while shaping how we apply multimodal LLMs, model distillation and fine-tuning, and next-generation embeddings at LinkedIn’s scale. 

As we reimagine LinkedIn Search for Gen Z-led, AI-native world, you’ll partner closely with engineering, data science, design, research, and operations to define the AI ranking strategy and bring it to life: from understanding our next-gen member intent to improving search result relevance, quality, and trust, and unlocking entirely new AI-powered search experiences. You’ll also collaborate across LinkedIn’s consumer and customer businesses to build search experiences that create meaningful connections and economic opportunity.

This is a true AI PM role: you’ll treat evals as the product, develop a deep understanding of model behavior and failure modes, and make thoughtful trade-offs across relevance, latency, inference cost, and member value. Your work will have a massive impact on helping members discover the right people and companies, form meaningful relationships, and unlock economic opportunity.

Why are we here: Ultimately, behind every successful search at LinkedIn there's a human who's getting one step closer to paying their mortgage, sending their kids to school, starting a small business, or funding their retirement. Your main responsibility is to keep nudging that "successful searches" counter upwards.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end ranking for people and company search, from understanding member intent and retrieving candidates to ranking relevant, high-quality, and trusted results.

• Define and execute the ranking strategy across query and content understanding, lexical and embedding-based retrieval, and multi-stage ranking; advance next-generation search using multimodal LLMs, model distillation and fine-tuning, state-of-the-art embeddings, etc.

• Develop a deep understanding of model behavior and failure modes while balancing relevance, latency, inference cost, and member value, evaluate experiments and make launch decisions, monitor ranking and search health, triage member feedback.

• Collaborate across LinkedIn’s consumer and customer businesses, align leadership around priorities, communicate strategy, progress, and key decisions.

• Build in a full-stack, AI-native builder way: write evals & golden sets instead of multi-page PRDs, embrace probabilistic thinking (reasoning in distributions, error rates, confidence levels), prototype at the speed of prompting rather than waiting for full engineering cycles.