Senior Product Manager - Search & Ranking

Description

At Catawiki, every day brings the extraordinary! Whether it’s Daniel Ricciardo’s Formula 1 Car , a Woolly Mammoth’s Skeleton , Lady Gaga's Jumpsuit or Usain Bolt’s running shoe , we encounter exceptional objects every day.

We’re a one-of-a-kind marketplace for buying and selling special objects. Each week, more than 100,000 unique items are auctioned, all carefully curated by our passionate in-house experts.

Having sold over 25 million unique objects, our mission is to become the world’s most popular destination for special objects. As a growing, diverse and sustainable scale-up, we proudly live by three core values. If these values resonate with you, we’d love to explore how you can join us.

Taking ownership and driving impact

Being open to change and feedback

Being passionate about our mission and our customers.

Your mission

Every Product Manager at Catawiki owns a meaningful part of the customer experience.

In Search and Ranking, your mission is to help buyers find the special objects they care about. You will shape how search, ranking and personalisation work across the buyer journey, making discovery more relevant and helping more buyers find objects they love.

This is a broad product area. It brings together buyer needs, expert curation, marketplace priorities, search experiences and machine learning. You will identify the most important opportunities, set a clear direction and lead a cross functional team from insight to measurable customer and business impact.

The solution is not prescribed. You may improve search relevance, ranking, recommendations or personalisation, or explore new AI enabled ways to help buyers discover objects. What matters is that you solve a meaningful customer problem, measure the impact and scale what works.

You will own the strategy, outcomes and execution for this area, working closely with Engineering, Design, Data Science, Marketing and Commercial teams.

Responsibilities

• Set and communicate a clear product vision, strategy and roadmap for Search and Ranking.
• Own measurable outcomes across search relevance, discovery, engagement and buyer conversion.
• Use behavioural data, customer research and commercial insight to identify and prioritise the biggest opportunities.
• Turn ambiguous customer and business problems into clear hypotheses, prototypes and executable plans.
• Lead initiatives from early discovery through experimentation, launch and scaling.
• Define success metrics and build a rigorous experimentation agenda for search, ranking and personalisation.
• Work with machine learning engineers and data scientists to assess model quality, test new approaches and improve customer outcomes.
• Improve the relevance of search results and recommendations across the buyer journey.
• Integrate personalisation into the customer experience in ways that feel useful, coherent and trustworthy.
• Design, run and evaluate experiments, using positive, negative and inconclusive results to guide decisions.
• Use AI and rapid prototyping to test ideas early, reduce development risk and accelerate learning.
• Create clarity, momentum and accountability across teams, including when priorities or incentives differ.
• Communicate strategy, performance, tradeoffs and recommendations clearly to senior and C level stakeholders.
• At least five years of product management experience, preferably in consumer ecommerce, marketplaces or another digital product at scale.
• Experience owning a broad product area or customer journey, rather than only individual features.
• Experience defining product strategy or roadmaps for search, ranking, recommendations, personalisation or other machine learning products.
• Confidence working with product metrics, experiments and commercial performance.
• Experience designing, running and analysing A/B tests, including tests involving machine learning products.
• The ability to turn uncertain opportunities into clear hypotheses, prototypes and plans.
• A practical understanding of machine learning concepts and how models become useful product experiences.
• Experience working closely with machine learning engineers and data scientists to develop and improve customer facing features.
• Comfort using AI tools to prototype quickly and explore customer experiences.
• The ability to balance immediate commercial opportunities with longer term product and platform investments.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to influence senior leaders without relying on formal authority.
• The pace, resilience and judgement to maintain a high standard of execution in an ambiguous environment.
• Where you will be
• This role is based in Amsterdam. We offer a relocation package for people currently living outside the Netherlands.
• Why You'll Love Working with Us
• Create a visible impact by working at scale in a global organisation serving millions of customers across 80+ categories. In our flat structure, every role has a broad scope and directly impacts both our customers and the business.
• Learn and grow through our Learning & Development initiatives, including clear development plans and mentorship programmes to support your career progression.
• A culture of connection defines us . We’re a passionate, diverse team of 800+ Catawikians representing 60+ nationalities. We foster an inclusive and queer-friendly environment where everyone is encouraged to bring their full self to work.
• Celebrate life’s moments with us. You’ll receive a €100 Catavoucher when you join, a €50 Catavoucher on your birthday, and an extra day off each year to “Pursue Your Passion ” . We also offer additional leave for key work anniversaries and important life events. Benefits may vary by location.
• Our Offices and Way of Working
• Our vibrant offices in Amsterdam and Lisbon are designed to inspire collaboration. Most Catawikians operate in a hybrid setup, combining office-based and remote work, with a minimum of two days per week in the office, unless a role is explicitly stated as fully remote or fully office-based.
• Interested?
• We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support the review of your application. AI may help us assess how your experience matches the requirements of the role, but hiring decisions are always made by our recruitment team

Requirements

• Three qualities matter most in this role.
• Outcome ownership
• You take responsibility for customer and business results, not only for delivering features. You stay with the problem, remove obstacles and change direction when the evidence calls for it.
• Systems thinking
• You understand how search, ranking, recommendations, auction dynamics, expert curation and marketplace health influence one another. You make thoughtful decisions across the full buyer journey.
• Experimental rigour
• You use data, research, prototypes and controlled experiments to make decisions. You learn from negative results and can distinguish meaningful progress from activity.