Director - Serach

About Client: We are a leading Digital Experience Software and Services company dedicated to providing comprehensive solutions across all touch points that enhance customer engagement and drive business growth. We are on a mission to pioneer the distribution and visibility of content with an innovative platform that drives discovery, personalized experiences, and conversions powered by data and AI. We pride ourselves on our collaborative culture and commitment to excellence in everything we do, and we are certified as a Great Place to Work.

About Role

We are looking for a highly strategic and execution-focused Director – Search to lead enterprise-scale search visibility initiatives across organic, local, technical, and AI-driven search ecosystems, based out of our Bangalore, India office. This role sits at the intersection of Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, Local SEO, Structured Data & Schema Engineering, Entity Optimization, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and AI-powered automation.

You will partner closely with Product, Engineering, Content, UX, Analytics, Local Listings, and Marketing teams to drive scalable organic growth across all search channels — traditional, local, and AI-generated. This is a Director level leadership role with P&L awareness, significant cross-functional influence, and full ownership of the Search strategy and product vision spanning Technical SEO, Local SEO, GEO, and Schema.

Problems We Are Looking to Solve

• Key challenges this role will address:
• How do enterprise brands remain visible and authoritative across traditional search, local search, and an AI-first world where answers are generated, not just linked?
• How do we build a scalable schema, entity intelligence, & local SEO layer that enables search engines and AI systems to deeply understand and surface our clients' digital properties across all discovery surfaces?
• How do we unify Technical SEO, Local SEO, and GEO into a cohesive search strategy that scales across complex, multi-location enterprise clients?
• How do we leverage AI tools, automation, and data workflows to surface insights faster, reduce manual effort, and operate at greater scale across large search programs?

Key Responsibilities

• Technical SEO & Platform Optimization
• Lead enterprise Technical SEO initiatives across large-scale websites and digital platforms for clients.
• Drive improvements in crawlability, rendering, indexing, Core Web Vitals, internal linking, site architecture, and page discoverability.
• Partner with Engineering and Product teams to operationalize SEO requirements into scalable platform capabilities.
• Build and maintain SEO governance frameworks, QA processes, and technical standards suited for the India delivery team.
• Optimize XML sitemaps, robots directives, canonicalization, pagination, hreflang, faceted navigation, and JavaScript rendering.

• Schema, Structured Data & Entity Optimization
• Own the enterprise schema and structured data strategy across all client digital properties — designing, implementing, and governing JSON-LD, schema.org types, and rich result eligibility at scale.
• Build and maintain entity mapping frameworks — identifying, disambiguating, and strengthening entity associations across Knowledge Graph, Wikidata, and search engine understanding layers.
• Lead knowledge graph alignment initiatives to improve brand, location, and product entity authority across Google, Bing, and AI retrieval systems.
• Develop QA and validation pipelines for schema deployment — including automated testing, structured data audits, and rich result monitoring via Google Search Console and third-party tools.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to build schema generation capabilities into the platform, enabling automated and scalable structured data deployment across client sites.

• Local SEO &; Multi-Location Search
• Own the Local SEO strategy across enterprise multi-location clients — driving visibility in Google Local Pack, Google Maps, and local organic search at scale.
• Govern Google Business Profile (GBP) optimisation, NAP consistency, local citation management, review signals, and local schema (LocalBusiness, GeoCoordinates, OpeningHours) across thousands of locations.
• Build local landing page strategies that combine technical excellence, schema markup, and locally relevant signals to improve proximity, relevance, and prominence for each location.
• Lead local SEO audits, competitive benchmarking, and performance analysis across verticals including hospitality, financial services, and retail.
• Leverage AI tools and automation to monitor, manage, and optimise GBP profiles and local search performance at scale across large location footprints.

• GEO, AI Search & Entity Optimization
• Define and execute strategies for GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) — improving how client brands are cited, surfaced, and recommended by AI-powered search systems such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot.
• Lead structured data strategy, schema deployment, entity mapping, knowledge graph alignment, and semantic search initiatives that improve machine comprehension of client digital assets.
• Drive machine readability and AI comprehension improvements — ensuring entities, relationships, and structured signals are optimized for both traditional and generative search retrieval.
• Partner with Product teams to operationalize GEO and AI visibility capabilities at scale.

• Data, Analytics & Automation
• Deeply analyze GSC, GA4, BigQuery, log files, crawl data, and enterprise SEO datasets to identify growth opportunities.
• Build scalable dashboards, reporting frameworks, and performance measurement systems for clients and internal stakeholders.
• Leverage SQL, Python, APIs, Looker Studio, BigQuery & AI workflows to automate insights & SEO operations.
• Establish measurable KPIs tied to traffic quality, AI visibility, local rankings, indexing health, and conversions.
• Champion AI-powered automation across search operations — deploying LLM-based workflows for keyword research, SERP analysis, schema generation, GBP optimisation, reporting, and competitive intelligence to drive efficiency at scale.

• Leadership & Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Lead and mentor a team of Search specialists based in Bangalore, with expertise spanning Technical SEO, Local SEO, schema engineering, entity optimization, GEO, and AI-powered search automation.
• Act as a strategic bridge between Marketing, Product, Engineering, Analytics, and Content teams globally.
• Influence roadmap prioritization and advocate for SEO/search experience at the platform level.
• Drive operational clarity, accountability, and execution excellence across all client initiatives.
• Collaborate with US-based leadership to align on strategy, priorities, and delivery standards.

Key Focus Areas

• Enterprise Technical SEO: crawl optimization, rendering, Core Web Vitals, site architecture.
• Local SEO: GBP optimisation, citation management, local schema, multi-location landing pages, proximity and prominence signals.
• Schema & Structured Data: JSON-LD implementation, schema.org coverage, rich result optimization, automated schema pipelines.
• GEO & AI Search: generative engine optimization, entity authority, citation readiness, AI retrieval signals.
• AI Automation & Efficiency: LLM-based SEO workflows, Python pipelines, AI-assisted operations, prompt engineering for search tasks.
• Data & Analytics: SEO reporting at scale, automation, Python/SQL-driven insights.
• Team Leadership: mentoring, process-building, cross-functional collaboration across India and US teams.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Marketing, Computer Science, Communications, or a related field.
• 10+ years of relevant SEO experience with at least 3–4 years in a Director or senior leadership capacity.
• Prior experience in a digital marketing agency, SaaS company, or MarTech environment preferred.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.

Required Experience

• 10+ years of experience in SEO, spanning Technical SEO, Local SEO, and organic search strategy, with demonstrated expertise in structured data, schema engineering, entity optimization, and GEO, preferably in an agency or SaaS environment.
• Demonstrated experience managing enterprise-scale, multi-location SEO programs across multiple clients or verticals including hospitality, financial services, or retail.
• Strong understanding of crawling, rendering, indexing, information architecture, and search systems.
• Hands-on expertise with Google Search Console, GA4, Screaming Frog, BigQuery, Looker Studio, Ahrefs / Semrush / enterprise SEO platforms, and Jupyter Notebook / Colab.
• Deep hands-on expertise in structured data implementation — JSON-LD, schema.org vocabulary (LocalBusiness, Product, FAQPage, HowTo, Article, Event, etc.), rich results, and entity disambiguation.
• Experience with Knowledge Graph, Wikidata, and semantic search systems.
• Deep expertise in Local SEO — Google Business Profile management, local citation ecosystems, NAP governance, local schema, and multi-location landing page optimization at enterprise scale.
• Experience working closely with Product and Engineering organizations.
• Proven ability to lead and grow a team of SEO and content professionals.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with ability to translate data into strategic decisions.
• Experience leveraging AI tools and workflows for SEO automation — including use of LLMs for content analysis, Python-based AI pipelines, prompt engineering for structured outputs, and AI-assisted workflows for tasks such as content auditing, keyword clustering, schema generation, and reporting at scale.
• Business acumen with the ability to connect SEO and content performance to revenue impact, client retention, and business growth outcomes.