United Kingdom · Technical roles · Senior Leadership (16-20 years experience)

Director of Search & Discovery

Here is the whole job, in plain words. What it is, a real day, what you decide, how you're judged, how people get here and where they go next. Then the part no course gives you: twelve AI tutors who learn your work.

Experience bandSenior Leadership (16-20 years experience)
Direct reports3-5 reports
Reports toVP of Engineering or Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
UK framework levelUsually a director, accountable for a division and its numbers

Also advertised as VP of Search Engineering · Head of Search Platform · Senior Director, Information Retrieval

Built on an analysis of 43,079 real UK job descriptions · grounded in qualifications employers recognise

Start with a free Future Fluency check, tuned to Director of Search & Discovery

Ten quick questions, one per Future Fluency, asked against this role rather than a generic one. About five minutes, and no card.

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1What this role really is

Honestly, this role is about shaping how our customers find what they need, making sure our search experience is not just good, but genuinely market-leading. You'll be the one setting the vision for search, building the teams, and making sure it all ties back to the business's big goals. It's a blend of deep technical strategy and people leadership, driving real business transformation through how people interact with our products.

2What you'd actually use

The tools this job runs on, and how well you'd need to know each one.

Elasticsearch / OpenSearchExpert

Making strategic decisions on version upgrades, plugin adoption, and overall search platform evolution. Evaluating alternatives like Solr or Vespa. Governing architectural choices for multi-tenant, multi-region cluster topologies.

Python (w/ libraries like `elasticsearch-py`, `sentence-transformers`)Expert

Designing and overseeing the Python framework for all search-related services. Setting coding standards, mentoring junior engineers, and integrating search services with broader MLOps pipelines. Guiding the development of robust data processing pipelines and evaluation harnesses.

AWS (S3, EC2, Kinesis, Lambda)Expert

Architecting the entire cloud infrastructure for the search platform. Making build-vs-buy decisions (e.g., managed OpenSearch vs. self-hosted on EC2). Focusing on cost optimisation, security, and scalability at an enterprise level.

Apache KafkaExpert

Architecting the enterprise event-streaming strategy that feeds the search platform. Governing schema evolution (using Avro/Protobuf) and ensuring data lineage and quality from source to search index.

Docker & KubernetesExpert

Designing the CI/CD pipeline for search services on Kubernetes. Managing cluster resources (resource quotas, node pools), planning scaling strategies (Horizontal Pod Autoscaler), and ensuring observability for the entire stack.

Vector Databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus)Expert

Leading the strategic decision to adopt a vector database. Evaluating vendors, designing the architecture for integrating it with the existing search stack, and defining the roadmap for semantic search capabilities across the organisation.

Observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog)Expert

Defining the entire observability strategy for the search platform. Implementing distributed tracing (e.g., using OpenTelemetry) to track a query across multiple services. Using observability data to drive architectural decisions and capacity planning.

3What you get to decide, and how that grows

Power in a job isn't your title. It's what you're allowed to decide. Here's how it grows as you move up.

The choice	Coming in	Where you are now	The step above
Strategic Technology Adoption (e.g., new vector database)	Escalate for guidance and approval.	Propose options with recommendations, seek approval from Senior/Lead.	Lead evaluation, make recommendations to Director, get approval.
Organisational Design & Key Hires	No authority.	No authority.	Provide input on team structure, participate in interviews.
Major Architectural Changes (e.g., re-platforming search)	Escalate technical issues.	Propose minor improvements within existing architecture.	Design and propose significant architectural improvements within a workstream.

4How you'll be judged

The scoreboard, honestly: the hard targets, how often each one is actually looked at, and the quiet human signals that never make it onto a dashboard.

Search-Driven Revenue/Conversion

The percentage of total revenue or conversion events directly attributed to users interacting with our search function.

Target · Increase search-driven conversion rate by 10% year-on-year, or contribute £5M+ in incremental revenue.

If Q2 search-driven revenue was £15M, we'd expect to see £16.5M+ in Q2 next year, or a clear path to that growth based on initiatives you've led.

Core Relevance Metrics (e.g., nDCG, MRR)

Industry-standard metrics that tell us how good our search results actually are, considering both position and relevance.

Target · Improve nDCG@10 by 5% quarter-on-quarter for our top 1,000 queries.

If our current nDCG is 0.75, we'd aim for 0.7875 next quarter, driven by the new LTR model you've championed.

Operational Efficiency & TCO

How efficiently we're running the search platform, looking at infrastructure costs versus the value it delivers.

Target · Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) for search infrastructure by 15-20% through architectural improvements and smart vendor management, while maintaining or improving performance.

If our current annual infrastructure spend for search is £1M, you'd be looking to bring that down to £800K-£850K without sacrificing quality or scalability.

Team Growth & Capability

Building and retaining a high-performing team, and measurably improving the organisation's overall search maturity.

Target · Achieve a 90% retention rate for high-performing search engineers and managers, and successfully onboard 10 new hires within 12 months.

Successfully hiring 3 Senior Search Engineers and 2 Search Engineering Managers in H1, with positive feedback on their onboarding and early contributions, alongside retaining all existing top talent.

Strategic Vision & Roadmap Clarity

How well you articulate a clear, compelling, multi-year vision for search that aligns with broader company goals, and how effectively that vision is translated into an actionable roadmap.

Regular positive feedback from the CPO and VP of Engineering on roadmap presentations
your team understands the 'why' behind their work
the search strategy is consistently referenced in broader company planning documents.

Cross-Functional Influence & Collaboration

Your ability to get other senior leaders and teams (Product, Data, Marketing) on board with search initiatives, and to ensure search is a truly integrated part of the overall customer experience.

You're proactively consulted on major product launches and data initiatives
other VPs champion your search projects
there are clear, documented agreements on shared goals and dependencies between your teams and others.

Organisational Development & Mentorship

How effectively you build, mentor, and empower your leadership team and the wider search organisation, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.

Your direct reports are visibly growing in their roles
you have clear succession plans in place for key positions
your team's engagement scores are consistently high
you're seen as a trusted advisor and coach by your managers.

Technical Governance & Architectural Soundness

Ensuring the search platform's architecture is robust, scalable, secure, and future-proof, avoiding technical debt and making smart build-vs-buy decisions.

Minimal critical production incidents related to search infrastructure
successful adoption of new technologies (e.g., vector databases) without major disruption
clear, well-communicated architectural principles for the search domain
positive reviews from security and platform engineering teams.

5Would you like it

The honest version. What people enjoy, and what grinds them down.

What people enjoy

Shaping the Future of Discovery

You'll spend time thinking about how users will interact with information in 3-5 years, then work backwards to define the technical roadmap. This means evaluating new AI models, exploring novel interaction patterns, and challenging the status quo.

Leading the charge to integrate generative AI into our search results, moving beyond simple keyword matching to conversational discovery, and seeing that vision start to take shape in early prototypes.

Building High-Performing Teams

A significant part of your day will involve mentoring your managers, coaching senior engineers, and strategising on talent acquisition and retention. You get a real kick out of seeing your people grow and succeed.

Successfully hiring a new Search Engineering Manager who quickly becomes a key leader, or seeing a Principal Engineer you've mentored present their architectural vision to the CTO with confidence.

Driving Tangible Business Impact

You're always connecting technical work back to business outcomes: increased conversion, improved customer satisfaction, reduced operational costs. You'll present these impacts to executive leadership and the board.

Presenting quarterly results to the executive team, showing how a new search feature you championed has directly contributed to a 15% uplift in a key revenue metric, or saved £500K in infrastructure costs.

What frustrates people

Dealing with executive-level political battles over resource allocation or strategic direction, where search might not always be the top priority.
Managing underperforming managers or engineers, which takes a significant amount of emotional energy and time.
The constant 'Google expectation' from senior leaders who don't fully grasp the scale and complexity differences.
Having to make difficult trade-offs between technical excellence and immediate business needs, knowing that some technical debt will accumulate.
The long cycle times for strategic initiatives; it can take years to see the full impact of your architectural decisions.

What this role does not give you

A daily coding fix (you'll be leading, not coding).
A quiet, heads-down environment (expect constant interaction and problem-solving).
The ability to unilaterally implement every technical idea you have (it's about influence and alignment).
A static, predictable environment (the tech landscape and business priorities are always shifting).

6Who you work with

This role directly drives customer engagement, conversion rates, and overall revenue by ensuring users can effectively discover products and content. It also significantly impacts operational efficiency, data quality, and our ability to innovate quickly in a competitive market. You're essentially the steward of one of our most critical user interaction points.

Inside the business

Chief Product Officer (CPO)
Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
VP of Data & Analytics
VP of Product Management
Senior Engineering Leads across other functions
Finance Leadership

Outside the business

Key technology vendors (e.g., Elasticsearch, AWS)
Industry analysts and thought leaders
Potential acquisition targets for search technology

7What you need before you start

Not a wish list. The things you would be expected to already have.

Proven track record of leading and scaling large-scale search or information retrieval platforms (100M+ documents, 1M+ queries/day).
Extensive experience (5+ years) managing multiple engineering teams and managers, with a focus on talent development and organisational growth.
Demonstrable experience owning and managing significant technology budgets (£2M+).
Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
A strong history of influencing executive-level stakeholders and driving strategic alignment across an organisation.
Experience with M&A integration from a technical leadership perspective (or equivalent experience leading large-scale system migrations).

8What to practise next

Where the job is going, and what to do about it starting this week.

Advanced Observability & AIOps for Search

As search systems become more complex (hybrid, vector, generative AI components), traditional monitoring isn't enough. We need to move towards predictive analytics and automated incident response, using AI to anticipate and resolve issues before they impact users.

Distributed Tracing & OpenTelemetry · Anomaly Detection & Predictive Monitoring · Automated Incident Response & Self-Healing

This quarter: Review current observability stack with your Principal Engineers; identify gaps in predictive capabilities and automated alerting.
Next 6 months: Define a strategic initiative to integrate AIOps principles into our search platform, starting with a proof-of-concept for anomaly detection.
Next 12 months: Invest in tools and training to build out advanced distributed tracing capabilities across all search services.
Ongoing: Foster a culture of 'observability as code' within your teams, ensuring all new services are built with robust telemetry.

Quick win: Challenge your teams to integrate a new, more granular metric into an existing Grafana dashboard this month, focusing on a subtle aspect of search performance that's currently hard to track.

9Staying current once you are in

What people here do to keep up

Regularly attend and speak at industry conferences (e.g., Berlin Buzzwords, Lucene Revolution, RecSys) to stay current and build your professional network.
Participate in executive leadership programmes or peer groups to hone your strategic and organisational development skills.
Mentor emerging leaders and senior engineers, both within and outside of our organisation.
Contribute to open-source projects or publish articles/papers on search and information retrieval to establish thought leadership.

10How the AI economy is changing work like this

Before we ask anything of you, here's what we can already say about AI and work of this kind:

The new skill this role is being asked for: Generative AI Integration & Strategy

Generative AI (like LLMs) is fundamentally changing how users expect to interact with information. It's moving beyond keyword matching to conversational search, summarisation, and personalised content generation. If we don't embrace this, we'll be left behind by competitors.

We'll only ever tell you what we can actually back up. No hype, no scare tactics.

The rising capability

Zavmo analysis

What's rising in its place

This is where the work is heading, and the higher pay with it. Get fluent here and the shift stops being a threat and starts being your edge.

Generative AI Integration & Strategy

Generative AI (like LLMs) is fundamentally changing how users expect to interact with information. It's moving beyond keyword matching to conversational search, summarisation, and personalised content generation. If we don't embrace this, we'll be left behind by competitors.

RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) Architectures
LLM Fine-tuning & Prompt Engineering at Scale
Ethical AI & Bias Mitigation in Search
Cost Optimisation for LLM Inference

What you’ll use

Skills this role draws on

Technical

Information Retrieval (IR) Strategic Direction
Relevance Tuning & Ranking Governance
Vector Search & Embeddings Roadmap
Distributed Systems Architecture for Search
Search Analytics & A/B Testing Strategy

The pathway

How you actually get there, here

How you become one varies far more by country than what one does. This is the UK route. Most people take one of these ways in; the right one depends on where you're starting from.

1
Principal Search Engineer / Staff Engineer
3-5 years as Principal/Staff
Skills to master
- Moving from deep technical expertise to broader architectural influence, cross-team technical leadership, and mentoring. You'll need to demonstrate the ability to drive technical strategy for major components.
You're ready to move on when
- Successfully architected and delivered multiple large-scale, complex search features or platform components.
- Consistently provided technical leadership and mentorship to other senior engineers.
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority.
- Proven ability to anticipate and mitigate future technical challenges for the platform.
2
Senior Search Engineering Manager (leading multiple teams)
3-5 years as Senior Manager
Skills to master
- Developing strong people management skills, managing managers, building organisational capability, and owning the delivery of major programmes. You'll need to show you can scale teams and manage budgets effectively.
You're ready to move on when
- Successfully managed multiple engineering teams, including other managers, achieving consistent delivery.
- Proven track record of hiring, retaining, and developing high-performing talent.
- Demonstrated ability to manage significant budgets and resources effectively.
- Strong collaboration skills, successfully partnering with Product and other Engineering leaders.
3
Head of Engineering (related domain, e.g., Recommendations, Data Platform)
2-4 years as Head of Engineering
Skills to master
- Broadening your leadership scope beyond search, understanding different technical domains, and applying strategic leadership principles to new areas. You'll need to show adaptability and a quick learning curve.
You're ready to move on when
- Successfully led an engineering function in a related, complex technical domain.
- Demonstrated ability to quickly grasp new technical challenges and build effective strategies.
- Strong leadership presence and ability to inspire and motivate diverse engineering teams.
- Proven ability to deliver significant business impact in a different technical context.

11Where this role leads

The long view:This Director role is a launchpad. It's where you'll cement your reputation as a leader who can build world-class technology organisations and deliver significant business impact. The path you choose next is yours to define, but the foundations you build here will set you up for truly exceptional things.

Pay & demand

Pay and demand for this role will appear here, each figure traced to a named authoritative source (e.g. the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, under the Open Government Licence). We don’t show numbers we can’t attribute.

The ten Future Fluencies

Zavmo analysis

The credential is what you can do today. These are what keep you valuable.

A qualification proves you can do the job as it's defined today. These ten are what decide whether you're still the obvious person for it in five years. They're the capabilities employers are now writing into senior roles faster than people are learning them. Zavmo weaves them through whatever you study, so you come out with both: the credential and the fluency.

The highlighted ones are the Fluencies your role leans on hardest, from how Director of Search & Discovery is actually changing. In about two minutes, the free confidence check asks where you stand on each of the ten. That's the whole check, and it's what makes the plan yours rather than generic.

12The team that's yours

No two people are taught the same way. This is one-to-one, not one-to-many.

Zavmo is a hyper-personalised AI learning platform. Twelve virtual tutors, each with a different way of teaching, and one orchestration agent that picks the right one for the moment. So every single lesson is shaped around you, your role, and the way you learn. Not a course everyone sits through. A conversation built for you, and no one else.

…and nine more, matched to you after your first chat. Meet all twelve

Start free and meet yours

13What it feels like

A conversation, not a course

Because your tutor knows your role, your projects and your last session, learning sounds like this. And it's different for every single person:

Data Science FoundationsLevel 7

Applied to your work in Director of Search & Discovery

1. To enable the learner to define the scope and landscape of Data Science and differentiate the roles of Data Scientists from other IT professionals. 2. To enable the learner to evaluate key topics within Data Science, including data administration, governance, and big data sources. 3. To enable the learner to describe the architecture and core elements of Apache Hadoop. 4. To enable the learner to analyse the advantages and disadvantages of utilising Artificial Intelligence techniques in a business context. 5. To enable the learner to critically analyse the impact of Big Data on digital transformation within organisations and its effects on users. 6. To enable the learner to review strategies for ensuring data compliance and explain the responsibilities and challenges faced by data specialists.

How the thinking builds

Remember
Understand
Apply
Analyse
Evaluate
Create

An illustration of a Zavmo lesson, built from this role’s own route. The unit, its objective and every criterion above are the awarding body’s own words, not an example.

One to one, not one to many

No two people run this the same way

A course is written once and handed to everyone. This is assembled around you, and keeps changing as it learns you. Five things it reads, and what each one changes.

Your actual work Every lesson is taught against a live piece of your own work, not a worked example from a textbook.
What you already know The first conversation finds your starting point, so you skip what you can already do and spend the time on what you cannot.
The conditions you learn under Not a learning-styles quiz. The evidence does not support those. The dimensions the research does back, read once and used to shape the plan.
How far you got last time It picks up mid-thought. The tutor knows what you said, what you struggled with, and what it asked you to try.
Which tutor suits the moment Twelve of them, each for a different kind of thinking. The one who walks you through a first idea is not the one who stress-tests it.

See how you learn, free. Eight questions, no sign-up. A directional taster; the diagnostic inside Zavmo goes deeper and keeps adapting.

DemonstrateIllustration

Evidenced on your work in Director of Search & Discovery

You do not finish by watching something. You finish by showing it on the work you already do, against the measures this job is judged on.

Search-Driven Revenue/ConversionThe percentage of total revenue or conversion events directly attributed to users interacting with our search function.If Q2 search-driven revenue was £15M, we'd expect to see £16.5M+ in Q2 next year, or a clear path to that growth based on initiatives you've led.Increase search-driven conversion rate by 10% year-on-year, or contribute £5M+ in incremental revenue.
Core Relevance Metrics (e.g., nDCG, MRR)Industry-standard metrics that tell us how good our search results actually are, considering both position and relevance.If our current nDCG is 0.75, we'd aim for 0.7875 next quarter, driven by the new LTR model you've championed.Improve nDCG@10 by 5% quarter-on-quarter for our top 1,000 queries.
Operational Efficiency & TCOHow efficiently we're running the search platform, looking at infrastructure costs versus the value it delivers.If our current annual infrastructure spend for search is £1M, you'd be looking to bring that down to £800K-£850K without sacrificing quality or scalability.Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) for search infrastructure by 15-20% through architectural improvements and smart vendor management, while maintaining or improving performance.
Team Growth & CapabilityBuilding and retaining a high-performing team, and measurably improving the organisation's overall search maturity.Successfully hiring 3 Senior Search Engineers and 2 Search Engineering Managers in H1, with positive feedback on their onboarding and early contributions, alongside retaining all existing top talent.Achieve a 90% retention rate for high-performing search engineers and managers, and successfully onboard 10 new hires within 12 months.

These are this job's own measures, with its own targets. Nothing is marked evidenced, because nobody has started this yet. Yours would fill in from the work you bring.

Your passport

This isn't a certificate you file away. It's a passport to the life you're designing.

Every credit you earn and every fluency you build adds up: evidence where it counts, carried with you. Zavmo keeps the map: where you are, where you're heading, and the next step, at your pace, around your life. From Director of Search & Discovery to VP of Engineering / Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and whatever you decide comes after.

Level 7 · in progressAI Fluency→ VP of Engineering / Chief Technology Officer (CTO)→ your design

Where this takes you

This Director role is a launchpad. It's where you'll cement your reputation as a leader who can build world-class technology organisations and deliver significant business impact. The path you choose next is yours to define, but the foundations you build here will set you up for truly exceptional things.

See Your Progress GrowIllustration

Director of Search & Discovery

Information Retrieval (IR) Strategic Direction
Relevance Tuning & Ranking Governance
Vector Search & Embeddings Roadmap
Distributed Systems Architecture for Search
Search Analytics & A/B Testing Strategy

This is your Mind Palace on learn.zavmo.ai. Every skill above comes from this role's own record, not an example borrowed from another job. A node lights up when you evidence it, and what you build stays yours between jobs. That is the part a course cannot do.

14The detail, folded away

Everything else the record holds

The career branches in full, how AI is already showing up in the day-to-day, and the questions people ask about this job. Here when you want them, out of the way while you decide.

Where it leads next, rung by rung

Where it leads

The career path, and where it branches

Director of Search & Discovery is a start, not a ceiling. Each step below asks for new skills and hands back more autonomy.

VP of Engineering / Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
3-5 years
L7 (C-Suite)
- Strategic oversight of all engineering functions (not just search).
- Defining and driving company-wide technology culture and innovation.
- Managing relationships with key technology partners and industry bodies.
- Leading large-scale organisational transformation initiatives.
Chief Product Officer (CPO) / Head of Product
4-6 years
L7 (C-Suite)
- Leading and scaling a large product management organisation.
- Defining the overall company product vision and strategy.
- Managing the full product lifecycle from ideation to launch and iteration.
- Driving product-led growth and innovation across the entire business.

Working with AI on the job

Working with AI

Where AI is starting to help

As a Director, your time is gold. Imagine reclaiming hours spent on strategic analysis, cross-functional communication, and even talent scouting. AI isn't just for engineers; it's a powerful co-pilot for leaders, helping you amplify your strategic impact and focus on what truly matters.

In Technical_roles, especially at a leadership level, AI can help you cut through the noise, make faster, more informed decisions, and communicate your vision with unparalleled clarity. We're talking about AI as a force multiplier for your leadership, not just a coding assistant.

AI-Powered Strategic Analysis

Use advanced LLMs to quickly synthesise market research, competitive intelligence reports, and internal performance data. Ask for SWOT analyses of new search technologies, identify emerging trends, or get a concise summary of a complex vendor proposal in minutes, not hours. This helps you make faster, more informed strategic bets.

Cross-Functional Communication AI

Draft executive summaries, board presentations, and strategic alignment documents in a fraction of the time. Feed AI your technical roadmap and ask it to generate a compelling narrative for the CPO, focusing on business value. It's like having a personal communications advisor on demand, ensuring your message lands perfectly every time.

AI for Talent Scouting & Development

Use AI to analyse industry talent pools, identify key skills gaps in your organisation, and even help draft personalised development plans for your managers. It can summarise candidate profiles, highlight relevant experience, and suggest interview questions tailored to specific leadership competencies. This frees you up to focus on the human connection.

Predictive Scenario Planning

Leverage AI to model the potential impact of different strategic decisions—e.g., 'What if we invest £5M in vector search vs. £5M in query understanding?'. Get probabilistic outcomes for revenue, customer retention, and operational costs, helping you stress-test your strategic choices before committing significant resources.

Common questions

How do you become a Director of Search & Discovery?

Common routes in include Principal Search Engineer / Staff Engineer (3-5 years as Principal/Staff), Senior Search Engineering Manager (leading multiple teams) (3-5 years as Senior Manager) and Head of Engineering (related domain, e.g., Recommendations, Data Platform) (2-4 years as Head of Engineering). Times vary with prior experience.

Where can a Director of Search & Discovery progress to?

This role can lead on to VP of Engineering / Chief Technology Officer (CTO) (3-5 years) and Chief Product Officer (CPO) / Head of Product (4-6 years), depending on the skills you build.

What level is a Director of Search & Discovery in the UK?

This role aligns to RQF Level 7 on the UK framework, a guide to the depth of qualification it maps to, not a hard entry bar.

What new skills matter most for a Director of Search & Discovery?

Increasingly, Generative AI Integration & Strategy. These are the areas where the higher-paid, future-proof work is heading.

The honest bit

You’ve started things before

Most of them were built for a room full of people who aren’t you. A cohort moves on whether or not your week allowed it, and by the third week the thing you’re behind on becomes the reason you stop opening it.

There’s no cohort here, and no timetable to fall behind. Before anything starts, Zavmo asks when you’re sharpest and how long you can realistically sit down for, then builds the sessions around those answers. A bad fortnight changes your pace. It doesn’t put you behind.

And you only pay once you start learning. Searching and planning are free, and you can cancel any time — so the cost of finding out is an afternoon, not a year.

What it costs

Less than one coaching session. Every month.

A single career-coaching hour costs more than a month of this, and it ends when the hour does. Zavmo doesn't. It's £70 a month, about £2.30 a day, for a companion that knows a Director of Search & Discovery, works on the job you actually do, and keeps going at your pace rather than a timetable's.

Searching and planning stay free. You only pay when you start learning.
Your credits are yours. Regulated, and they don't vanish when a subscription ends.
Cancel any time and billing stops. No notice period, no minimum term.

Your path, personalised

You have the map. Walking it is the part we do together.

This route runs to 2 national skill standards. That is a real journey.

Zavmo shapes a learning experience as unique as you are. It fits how you learn, your pace and the work you already do. Every step stays benchmarked to recognised national standards. That’s the plan for becoming a Director of Search & Discovery: personal to you, and it still counts. The first steps are free.

Independent research finds well-designed intelligent tutoring performs nearly as well as one-to-one human tutoring: VanLehn (2011), Educational Psychologist.

A private tutor in the UK averages £35–40 an hour . Zavmo is £70/month.

A Zavmo curriculum screen: a three-month plan built for a customer support lead, five Ofqual-regulated units and a hundred and ninety-six credits. — A real plan on learn.zavmo.ai: Ofqual-regulated units, credits, and a three-month run at your own pace.

Start free No commitment. See your first steps free.

15Where to go from here

Other roles at Level 7

Same depth of qualification, different job. Useful if the work appeals but this particular role does not.

Other roles in Technical roles

Stay in the field you know and move sideways rather than up.

If you leave this industry

The skills you'll hone in this role—strategic leadership, large-scale distributed systems, AI/ML application, and organisational development—are highly transferable across almost any technology-driven industry, from e-commerce and media to fintech and healthcare. Your expertise in 'discovery' is universally valuable.

Not sure this is the right direction?

Work out what you actually want from work first, then come back and see which roles fit it. Takes about ten minutes.

You're not behind. You're right on time. The shift is only just beginning. Your role won't look the same in two years. Be the one who leads the change, not the one it happens to. Build my plan, free Here's the first ten minutes: a 2-minute confidence check → your personalised roadmap → meet the tutors matched to you. No card, cancel any time. No card. Build your plan, see your roadmap and meet the twelve tutors matched to you. All free. When you're ready to start learning, it's £70 a month, billed monthly. Cancel any time and billing stops.

Director of Search & Discovery

What's rising in its place

Generative AI Integration & Strategy

Skills this role draws on

Technical

How you actually get there, here

Principal Search Engineer / Staff Engineer

Senior Search Engineering Manager (leading multiple teams)

Head of Engineering (related domain, e.g., Recommendations, Data Platform)

The credential is what you can do today. These are what keep you valuable.

Roles this leads to

No two people are taught the same way. This is one-to-one, not one-to-many.

A conversation, not a course

No two people run this the same way

This isn't a certificate you file away. It's a passport to the life you're designing.

Everything else the record holds

The career path, and where it branches

VP of Engineering / Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Chief Product Officer (CPO) / Head of Product

Where AI is starting to help

AI-Powered Strategic Analysis

Cross-Functional Communication AI

AI for Talent Scouting & Development

Predictive Scenario Planning

Common questions

You’ve started things before

Less than one coaching session. Every month.

You have the map. Walking it is the part we do together.