Director, Capability Engineering – Search, Personalization & Recommendation CDH

The Director Capability Engineering-Search Personalization & Recommendation will lead enterprise-wide digital innovation product delivery experience design and security operations across Mayo Clinics integrated systems. This role is pivotal in advancing Mayos digital transformation strategy while ensuring excellence in end-user experience governance brand consistency and operational agility.

The Director will collaborate across clinical technical design and business functions to drive strategic outcomes through innovation technology leadership and multidisciplinary team engagement. The role includes ownership of complex digital initiatives leading teams of experts in their respective domains and ensuring digital solutions align with enterprise values compliance frameworks and human-centered design principles.

Digital Product and Platform Leadership: Lead the full product lifecycle: strategy prioritization development deployment and evolution. Ensure alignment between business strategy clinical operations and end-user needs. Apply Agile methodologies to deliver scalable high-impact digital solutions. Translate user insights into actionable roadmaps that shape clinical and consumer-facing platforms. Familiarity with regulatory standards (e.g. HIPAA WCAG) especially in healthcare settings.

Experience Design and Research: Champion a culture of user-centricity and evidence-based decision-making. Lead persona development journey mapping and usability testing efforts. Oversee the execution and maturation of experience design research methodologies tools and process standardization. Apply service design principles to identify friction points and inform optimization strategies.

Design Systems and Content Strategy: Oversee governance and scalability of enterprise-wide design systems and UX standards. Drive creation and maintenance of reusable UI components accessibility standards and brand guidelines. Collaborate with engineers and designers to ensure a consistent and inclusive digital presence. Develop content strategy frameworks to support institutional communication and engagement.

Information Security Leadership: Partner with technical teams and compliance leaders to guide cybersecurity priorities. Provide governance for enterprise information security policies and tools. Support incident response and risk mitigation activities with tactical leadership. Promote a culture of data stewardship awareness and proactive threat response.

Team Leadership and Organizational Development: Track record of innovation in complex matrixed environments. Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity and lead through change. Build and nurture high-performing diverse teams across geographies and disciplines. Mentor and develop team members instilling accountability and innovation. Establish measurable goals support professional development and promote collaboration. Drive operational excellence through structure planning and transparency.

Team Leadership and Organizational Development: Track record of innovation in complex matrixed environments. Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity and lead through change. Build and nurture high-performing diverse teams across geographies and disciplines. Mentor and develop team members instilling accountability and innovation. Establish measurable goals support professional development and promote collaboration. Drive operational excellence through structure planning and transparency.

This role will lead a team of approximately 30 engineers and manage the delivery and operations of capabilities that will be used by several product teams across CDH and potentially across the enterprise.

Technical Skills:

• Search Algorithms & Indexing: Deep understanding of information retrieval inverted indexes ranking algorithms and relevance tuning.
• Search Platforms: Hands-on experience with Elasticsearch Solr or similar search engines.
• Query Optimization: Expertise in query parsing boosting faceting and handling large-scale search queries efficiently.
• Recommendation Algorithms: Strong knowledge of collaborative filtering content-based filtering and hybrid approaches.
• Personalization Techniques: Experience with user profiling behavioral analytics and context-aware recommendations.
• Machine Learning for Recommendations: Familiarity with deep learning models for personalization (e.g. embeddings neural collaborative filtering).
• Experience with feature engineering model deployment and monitoring in production environments.
• Knowledge of A/B testing frameworks for evaluating recommendation performance.
• Strong skills in Python Java or Scala for backend and ML development.
• Familiarity with ML libraries (TensorFlow PyTorch Scikit-learn) and search APIs.
• Understanding of distributed systems and high-performance architectures.
• Proficiency in cloud platforms (AWS GCP Azure) for hosting search and recommendation services.
• Experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) or similar technologies

Leadership & Strategic Skills:

• Proven experience in leading engineering teams focused on AI-driven personalization and search.
• Driving innovation in user experience through intelligent recommendations and personalized content.

This vacancy is not eligible for sponsorship/ we will not sponsor or transfer visas for this position. Also Mayo Clinic DOES NOT participate in the F-1 STEM OPT extension program.

Bachelors degree in a related field (e.g. Computer Science Design Business Cybersecurity Health Informatics). Minimum of 10 years of progressive leadership experience in at least one of the following areas: digital health product development UX design enterprise security or systems operations. Proven experience leading large cross-functional teams and managing enterprise-level initiatives.

Advanced degree (e.g. MS MBA MDes MPH) in a relevant discipline preferred.

The ideal candidate will possess:

• 10 years in software engineering with 5 years in search/recommendation systems leadership roles.
• Track record of delivering large-scale search and personalization platforms.
• Experience in multi-channel ecosystems (web mobile APIs).
• Familiarity with privacy regulations (GDPR CCPA) for personalized experiences.
• Exposure to Generative AI for personalized content.
• Experience with knowledge graphs and semantic search.
• Familiarity with real-time personalization and contextual recommendations.