AI Product Engineer Search & Growth

AI Product Engineer – Search & Growth

• Location: Gurgaon
• Direct Reports: 2 Engineers (Full-Stack + Data/Tooling)

About PlanetSpark

PlanetSpark is India's leading platform for kids and grown-ups communication skills—public speaking, creative writing, and spoken English. Trusted by 100,000+ parents across 10+ countries, we run live 1:1 and group expert-led classes for ages 4–16, powered by an AI-augmented teaching stack.

Organic search currently brings 4M+ monthly clicks, 280M+ impressions, and hundreds of thousands of leads per quarter. The 12–18 month frontier is winning organic traffic in the AI era—where Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude are reshaping how families find learning resources.

We're hiring a senior AI Product Engineer – Search & Growth to own this entire frontier with a small, sharp, AI-armed team.

Why This Role Exists

The old playbook—hiring writers in bulk to publish AI-drafted content—is now a liability. Google's scaled-content-abuse and helpful-content updates have demoted entire sites that played that game. AI search engines reward authority, original data, and structured content. The companies that win the next five years of organic growth will be the ones that build technical infrastructure, brand entity signals, and original first-hand expertise.

We need one leader who can hold that whole picture—strategy, technical SEO, content judgment, GEO (generative engine optimization), and the discipline to ship code themselves—supported by two engineers and AI coding tools. No more layers, no more committees, no more freelancer brigades.

What You'll Own

• Organic Performance: Traffic, leads, demos, and attributed revenue across PlanetSpark's entire site footprint (Blogs, New LPs, Worksheets, Resources, Courses, Tutor listings, programmatic city/grade templates).
• Automated Governance: A 131-item living SEO checklist with daily / weekly / monthly automated audits. You inherit it; you evolve it.
• AI-Search Visibility: Citation strategy to get PlanetSpark cited in Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude responses for category queries.
• Editorial Standards: High bars for AI-augmented content—every published piece must have at least one element AI couldn't generate (original data, named coach quote, internal benchmark, etc.).
• Author Authority Layer: Real, named PlanetSpark coaches with credentials, Person schema, byline pages, and LinkedIn integration.
• Team Leadership: Two direct reports (a full-stack engineer and a data/tooling engineer), with you acting as both their manager and their pair-programmer.
• Direct Execution: Shipping MRs yourself—schema components, copy fixes, lead-magnet variants—using Claude Code, Cursor, or your tool of choice. You are not blocked on engineering for small changes.

Key ResponsibilitiesStrategy & Ownership

• Define and own the 12-month SEO roadmap across all product surfaces.
• Decide what to publish, what to deprecate, and what to consolidate.
• Set the editorial bar and enforce it unflinchingly.

Technical SEO & GEO

• Indexation Health: Manage sitemaps, robots, canonicals, soft-404 audits, and GSC coverage.
• Schema Markup: Write JSON-LD by hand and validate structures for Article, BlogPosting, FAQPage, LearningResource, Course, Person, ProfilePage, BreadcrumbList, and Organization.
• Core Web Vitals: Partner with engineers on LCP/INP/CLS budgets per template.
• AI-Search Hygiene: Implement llms.txt, definitional first paragraphs, sameAs entity linking, structured Q&A, and named expert E-E-A-T signals.

Content & Editorial

• Set the editorial standard: ensure every piece features original data, a named coach POV, or proprietary insight—no exceptions.
• Commission and edit PlanetSpark Index-style original-data reports (4–6 per year).
• Build and maintain author hubs (real coach profiles, credentials, photos).
• Audit and consolidate the existing content corpus—noindex / merge the bottom 30% over the first 90 days.

Code & Engineering

• Ship merge requests directly for SEO/schema/copy work using AI coding tools.
• Review your engineers SEO-touching PRs.
• Act as the ultimate source of truth on schema validation, canonical strategy, and template-level SEO patterns.

Measurement & Reporting

• Weekly: Interpret auto-generated SEO health snapshots.
• Monthly: Conduct AI-citation audits, brand SERP reviews, and track top regressions.
• Quarterly: Present strategic reviews directly to the CEO and leadership team.

QualificationsMust-Have Experience

• SEO Expertise: 5–8 years of SEO experience, with at least 2 of those years leading a team or owning a major site's organic strategy.
• Proven Growth: Demonstrated organic growth at a content-heavy, edtech, or e-commerce site (metrics required: traffic before $rightarrow$ after, revenue impact).
• Technical Fluency: Ability to read JSX/TypeScript/Python, comfort with git, and experience shipping MRs yourself.
• AI-Native Workflow: Hands-on experience with at least one AI coding assistant (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Aider) used regularly for production work.
• Schema Mastery: Advanced knowledge of schema markup with the ability to write, validate, and debug JSON-LD by hand.
• Editorial Eye: Strong editorial voice capable of rewriting filler; commitment to shipping 30 exceptional pieces over 300 mediocre ones.
• Tooling Stack: Working knowledge of Next.js, headless CMS (Strapi or similar), GA4, GSC, Bing Webmaster Tools, and PSI / CrUX.
• GEO Innovation: A proven track record of AI-search / GEO work, or demonstrated curiosity and early experiments in the space.

Nice-to-Haves

• Domain knowledge in education, kids, or parenting spaces.
• Experience managing programmatic SEO at scale (city $times$ subject $times$ grade templates).
• Open-source contributions, published SEO writing, or a public portfolio.
• Experience working alongside offshore content and development teams.
• Comfort presenting directly to a CEO and board members.

Educational Requirement

• Mandatory: Graduation or Post-Graduation from a Tier-1 college/institution.
• Preferred institutes include: IITs, IIMs, BITS Pilani, NSIT, DTU, IIITs, top NITs, ISB, XLRI, FMS, and equivalent benchmark institutions.

Success Metrics (First 12 Months)

• Organic-attributed revenue +50% year-over-year.
• AI-search citation share for category queries $ge$ 25% (above baseline).
• Lead-to-demo conversion on top 25 pages +30% vs current baseline.
• Top 10 product templates: median mobile LCP < 2.5s, INP < 200ms.

What We Offer

• Direct reporting line into senior leadership—no committees or political layers.
• A small, high-leverage team built and run directly by you.
• Full reimbursement for all top-tier AI tools: Claude Pro, Cursor, ChatGPT Plus, and Perplexity Pro.
• An annual learning budget dedicated to industry conferences and courses.

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