About You

You combine deep technical expertise with strong analytical judgement and a genuine fascination with search and complex problem-solving.

You are comfortable when the answer is not immediately obvious. You can investigate a problem, understand the underlying technical and commercial constraints, make informed decisions and create a clear route towards a solution.

You can demonstrate this through specific examples of complex technical problems you have personally owned and solved, particularly within large-scale or enterprise environments. You also have the curiosity and creativity to test new approaches and the judgement to determine when an experiment can become repeatable client delivery.

Attitude & Behaviours

You thrive in a high-trust environment and bring:

• Ownership and accountability: You take responsibility for significant client outcomes, deliver on commitments and raise risks early.
• Technical judgement: You can assess complex problems, weigh competing considerations and make clear, evidence-based decisions.
• Precision: You define problems clearly, work from evidence and communicate technical reasoning and trade-offs.
• Curiosity and experimentation: You test ideas, challenge assumptions and learn quickly as search and AI technologies evolve.
• Collaborative leadership: You can bring together people from different disciplines and create the clarity needed to get complex work shipped.
• Clear communication: You can explain sophisticated technical issues to both specialists and non-specialists and influence senior stakeholders.
• Practical delivery: You care about getting solutions implemented, rather than stopping at analysis or recommendations.

Required Skills & Experience

• 5–10 years of experience in technical search, with evidence of operating at a senior level on complex enterprise work.
• Experience working with large enterprise customers and collaborating directly with developers, architects, product teams and digital marketers to deliver measurable outcomes.
• Deep knowledge of technical SEO, including crawling, rendering, indexation, site architecture, performance, server logs, complex CMS and front-end frameworks.
• Strong understanding of how technical search is evolving with AI assistants, LLM-driven search and answer-first experiences.
• Experience diagnosing and solving complex crawling and crawl-budget challenges on large-scale websites.
• Strong understanding of faceted navigation/search within enterprise e-commerce environments, including the crawling and indexation problems created by large numbers of filters, parameters and URL combinations.
• Strong diagnostic skills using logs and crawl data, including identifying and removing access issues affecting both search engines and LLM-driven assistants.
• Practical experience designing and validating structured data patterns and information architecture that support entity understanding, citations and answer-first discovery.
• Experience turning technical analysis into clear specifications and implementation plans and supporting technical teams through delivery.
• Comfort designing experiments and success metrics to validate whether changes improve visibility, citations and assistant-driven conversions.
• Familiarity with platforms and tooling such as Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, Ahrefs/SEMrush, GA/Adobe, Botify, Looker Studio, Grafana, etc.
• Web coding experience in HTML and CSS.
• High standard of written and spoken business English.

Demonstrating Lead-Level Experience

We are particularly interested in the complexity of the problems you have solved and the role you personally played in solving them.

Strong candidates should be able to talk in detail about situations where they have diagnosed difficult technical problems, determined the appropriate solution, navigated technical or commercial constraints and worked with other teams to get the solution implemented.

Experience with crawl-budget management and faceted search/navigation on large enterprise or e-commerce websites is particularly relevant. We will want to understand the specific problem you encountered, what made it complex, how you diagnosed it, the options and trade-offs you considered, the solution you arrived at and your role in getting it implemented.

Nice to Have

• Scripting or data skills in Python, JavaScript or SQL, and experience with tools like BigQuery for analysing logs and crawl data at scale.
• Experience with edge and CDN platforms such as Akamai, Cloudflare or Vercel, including bot management and edge SEO.
• Hands-on work with headless and JavaScript-heavy stacks such as Next.js, React or Nuxt, including SSR and rendering trade-offs.
• Experience with site migrations or replatforming for large enterprise sites.
• Familiarity with AI visibility and citation tracking tools such as Profound.
• An understanding of accessibility and semantic HTML (ARIA, landmarks, form patterns), and how these affect AI agents using a site.
• Experience working with US-based clients and stakeholders.
• A profile in the SEO or AEO community, through speaking, writing, research or open-source work.

How You Work

• You work from evidence. You check logs, crawl data and source material before you give an opinion, and you say clearly how confident you are.
• You test before you recommend. You'd rather run a small, controlled experiment than rely on received wisdom.
• You're comfortable saying "we don't know yet". You're just as open when an earlier finding turns out to be wrong.
• You can take an ambiguous technical problem, determine what matters and create a clear route towards solving it.
• You write specs that developers can build from and summaries that leadership can forward.
• You can lead conversations with technical teams and senior stakeholders, adapting the level of detail to the audience.
• You learn new platforms, frameworks and AI search behaviours quickly, and you change your approach when the evidence changes.
• You give and take feedback directly, and you care about getting the detail right.
• You share what you learn, whether that's through internal tools, playbooks or Merj research.

Benefits

Merj is a welcoming, collaborative, and rewarding workspace where you will work with some of the best technical SEO experts in the world and your ideas and work will shape how we grow. We invest in meaningful work, deep client relationships, and doing things the right way.

In addition to competitive remuneration, here’s what you can expect as part of the Merj team:

• Annual Bonus: Performance-based bonus scheme to reward your contribution when we hit our profit targets.
• Health Cash Plan: Membership to help with everyday healthcare costs, including coverage for your children.
• Remote Working: Flexibility to work remotely as standard.
• Enhanced Leave For Tenure: 25 days plus bank holidays