Manager - Engineering– Search (Elasticsearch)

Job Title: Manager - Engineering | Majid Al Futtaim Retail

Business Introduction

Majid Al Futtaim Holding is the leading shopping mall, retail, communities, entertainment developer and operator in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia regions. With over 43,000 people, revenues of over US$ 11 Billion, and operations in 18 countries. Some of the iconic brands we carry include Mall of the Emirates, Carrefour, All Saints, Lego, City Center, Abercrombie & Fitch, & Vox Cinemas. We believe in making Great Moments for Everyone, Every day.

We’re expanding our core engineering team and need a hands-on technical leader who can architect, deliver, and own business-critical platforms end-to-end. If you love turning bold ideas into reliable, high-throughput systems that directly move the P&L needle—we want to meet you!

Principal Engineer – Search (Elasticsearch)

Key Responsibilities:

• Take full technical ownership of the Search platform built on Elasticsearch and Elastic Cloud, ensuring scalability, resilience, and world-class performance.

• Architect, optimize, and manage Elasticsearch clusters, indices, mappings, analyzers, and queries to deliver highly relevant and reliable search experiences.

• Collaborate with Product Managers, Data Scientists, and Engineering Leaders to design and deliver Elasticsearch-powered solutions across e-commerce and omni-channel platforms.

• Drive development of advanced search features such as ranking models, autocomplete, personalization, multilingual support, typo tolerance, and semantic search.

• Lead engineering efforts integrating Java, Node.js, Redis, Kafka, MongoDB and Azure-based services into the search ecosystem.

• Oversee rollout, monitoring, and continuous improvement of search systems hosted on Elastic Cloud and Azure infrastructure.

• Ensure seamless integration of search with data pipelines, caching layers, and event-driven systems leveraging Redis and Kafka.

• Provide technical leadership to the Search team, mentoring engineers, conducting design/code reviews, and ensuring best practices are followed.

• Collaborate with engineering managers to guide, influence, and uplift the overall technical delivery and productivity of the team.

• Champion observability, reliability, and DevOps practices for search systems in production.

• Actively contribute to long-term strategy, roadmap planning, and adoption of modern search technologies.

Skills and Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 7+ years of deep expertise in Elasticsearch/Elastic Cloud (mandatory).

• Proven experience in designing and scaling Elasticsearch-based distributed systems in production.

• Strong proficiency in Java and Node.js for backend and API development.

• Hands-on expertise with Redis for caching, session management, and performance optimization.

• Solid experience with Kafka for building scalable, event-driven data pipelines.

• Deep understanding of Azure cloud services including managed Elasticsearch, compute, storage, and networking.

• Strong grasp of search relevance tuning, custom scoring, query optimization, and performance tuning in Elasticsearch.

• Experience managing large-scale, high-traffic search systems with complex indexing and ranking requirements.

• Demonstrated ability to lead, mentor, and grow engineering teams while fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration.

• Excellent problem-solving, debugging, and system design skills.

• Strong communication and leadership skills with the ability to influence stakeholders across the organization.

• Hands-on experience with Elastic Cloud Enterprise and managed deployments.

• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).

• Exposure to vector search, embeddings, and NLP integrations in Elasticsearch.

• Experience with microservices, serverless architectures, and event-driven systems.

• Strong understanding of DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and observability tools.

• Experience in Agile/Scrum methodologies and collaboration tools (JIRA, Confluence).Principal Engineer – Search (Elasticsearch & Distributed Systems)