Principal Product Manager - Search

Principal Product Manager – Beauty Search

Location: Bengaluru

Team: Product – Nykaa Beauty

Company Overview

Nykaa is India's leading beauty and lifestyle destination, operating on an omnichannel model with a strong online presence and an expanding network of retail stores. We offer a comprehensive selection of beauty, skincare, hair care, wellness, and fashion products, catering to millions of customers across the country. Nykaa is committed to providing a curated, personalized, and seamless shopping experience through cutting-edge technology and data-driven insights.

Role Overview

As a Principal Product Manager – Search at Nykaa, you will own the end-to-end search experience across our app and web platforms. This is not a UI/UX-only role — you are a product builder who will redefine how millions of users discover beauty and lifestyle products through intelligent, AI-first search. You will work at the intersection of information retrieval, natural language understanding, and machine learning to build search experiences that are fast, relevant, and increasingly personalized. You will partner closely with Data Science, Engineering, and Design teams to ship high-impact features and continually raise the bar on search quality and innovation.

Key Responsibilities

1. Own and Elevate the Core Search Experience

• Define and drive the product roadmap for search — spanning query understanding, spell correction, synonym handling, ranking, and results relevance.

• Move beyond keyword matching to build intent-aware search using NLP and semantic understanding to surface the right products at the right moment.

• Own core search KPIs including search conversion rate, zero-result rate, click-through rate, and post-search funnel metrics.

2. Build AI-First Search Features

• Identify and launch AI-native features such as conversational search (LLM-powered), and generative product recommendations triggered from search intent.

• Partner with Data Science teams to build, evaluate, and iterate on ML models — including learning-to-rank, query classification, and personalized re-ranking.

• Leverage LLMs and foundation models to prototype and ship new search experiences at speed — from auto-complete enhancements to AI-generated search summaries.

3. Experimentation and Data-Driven Iteration

• Design and run a rigorous A/B testing pipeline to validate ranking changes, UI treatments, and new feature hypotheses before full rollout.

• Analyze search logs, query patterns, and behavioral data to uncover friction points and improvement opportunities across the search funnel.

4. Cross-functional Execution

• Write detailed PRDs and technical specs that translate business goals into clear model requirements and engineering deliverables.

• Collaborate with Category, Merchandising, and Marketing teams to ensure product catalog quality and tagging support strong search outcomes.

• Stay current on global search and AI trends — benchmark against leading e-commerce and AI-native search experiences to continuously raise the bar.

Required Skillset

• Academic Background: Bachelor's or Master's degree , preferably in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.

• Experience: At least 7 years of product management experience in consumer internet or e-commerce, with direct ownership of search, discovery, or AI/ML-powered features.

• Technical Fluency: Comfortable working with Data Science and Engineering teams. Able to meaningfully discuss query understanding, ranking models, embeddings, precision/recall trade-offs, and API design.

• AI Familiarity: Working knowledge of modern AI/ML techniques relevant to search — including NLP, vector search, semantic retrieval, LLMs, and personalization signals.

• Analytical Depth: Strong command of data — able to define success metrics, interpret A/B test results, and use behavioral analytics to drive prioritization.

• Product Thinking: Ability to translate complex technical capabilities into simple, delightful user experiences that drive measurable business outcomes.

• Communication: Able to bridge technical complexity and business strategy, keeping engineering, design, and business stakeholders aligned.

Good to Have

• Prior experience with search platforms, recommendation systems, or catalog quality tooling.

• Exposure to LLM-based product development, prompt engineering, or AI product prototyping.

• Familiarity with beauty, fashion, or lifestyle e-commerce and the nuances of catalog-driven search.

Why Join Us

Nykaa Beauty is India's largest and most loved beauty e-commerce destination. You'll join a high-ownership, high-impact product team building search experiences used by millions of customers every day. This role gives you the canvas to build AI-first features at scale — at a company where search is a core growth lever.