Location: Remote with office days in London. We currently meet at least monthly and are likely to increase this. Applicants should be based within a comfortable commuting distance of central London.
Contract: Full or part time (at least 24hrs per week)
Merj is a deeply technical SEO and AEO partner to global enterprise clients, engineering platforms, data and technology for meaningful performance. We shape resilient, discoverable platforms designed for good bots, search engines, and customers alike.
- Engineered advantage: We find and implement hidden advantages that others miss to give our clients a clear edge.
- Future-ready leadership: We actively experiment, test, and adapt to emerging search and AI technologies.
- Strategic clarity: We make sense of complexity to define clear paths for growth.
The Role
As a Lead Technical SEO/AEO Consultant, you will lead complex technical search initiatives for global enterprise clients, helping them win in a search landscape that increasingly includes AI assistants, LLM-driven search, and answer-first experiences.
You will bring deep technical SEO expertise alongside the judgement and problem-solving ability to take ambiguous or complex challenges, diagnose what is happening, define the right approach and lead clients and delivery teams through to implementation.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will provide strategic direction, run structured discovery and design solutions, while remaining close enough to execution to ensure recommendations become meaningful outcomes.
What you will do
- Own client strategy and delivery: Lead technical search and AEO strategy for enterprise clients, defining roadmaps, outcomes and measurement plans and taking accountability for successful delivery.
- Lead complex discovery: Diagnose technically challenging problems, map constraints and opportunities, and bring structure to ambiguous situations involving SEO, AEO, engineering, product, data and content.
- Design and spec solutions: Turn complex findings into clear technical solutions, specifications, tickets and implementation plans that development and product teams can execute.
- Lead enterprise technical problem-solving: Solve challenges involving crawling, rendering, indexation, site architecture, performance, migrations, templates, complex CMS and front-end environments, crawl budget and large-scale faceted navigation.
- Lead major migrations and technical change: Help clients navigate high-risk or technically complicated website changes, identifying dependencies and risks and providing clear technical direction throughout delivery.
- Build proof-of-concepts: Create or lead lightweight prototypes and experiments to validate approaches and de-risk significant decisions.
- Ship AEO initiatives: Improve how brands are discovered and represented in AI answers through structured data, entity modelling, information architecture and content governance. Diagnose and remove bot-access blockers using log data and run experiments to validate impact on citations and assistant-driven journeys.
- Work directly with technical teams: Collaborate with developers, architects, product teams and other specialists to ensure solutions are practical and successfully implemented.
- Provide senior client guidance: Explain complex technical issues clearly, navigate competing priorities and trade-offs, and give senior stakeholders confidence in the recommended approach.
- Measure impact: Define metrics and dashboards, use evidence to evaluate outcomes and adapt the approach where necessary.
- Contribute to Merj R&D: Help evolve internal tooling, playbooks, methodologies and points of view on SEO, AEO and emerging search technologies.
- Raise technical capability: Share knowledge and help create clarity and direction for others working across complex technical search problems.
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.
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
- Experience with edge and CDN platforms such as Akamai, Cloudflare or Vercel, including bot management and edge SEO.
- 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.
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 as standard, and your holiday allowance increases the longer you’re with us.
- Revolut Membership: Premium membership giving you access to a suite of lifestyle benefits, including:
- Global travel and cancellation insurance
- Airmiles and airport lounge access and 3GB of monthly travel data
- Access to premium learning and news platforms, wellness apps and other services
- Conference or Volunteering Day: Dedicated time to attend industry conferences or volunteer for causes you care about.
- Holiday Purchase & Carryover Leave: Option to buy additional holiday days if you need more time off, or carry over unused holiday to the next year.
- Enhanced sick pay beyond statutory requirements.
We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels valued, respected, and supported. We welcome applications from individuals of all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, or any other protected characteristic.
If you need any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, please let us know, and we will be happy to accommodate.
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