Search Engineer

(Key skills: Java, Microservices, Elasticsearch / Solr)

Essential Functions and Responsibilities

• Design and architect search & recommendations platforms, including next-generation and legacy systems.
• Focus on improving search relevance, ranking, recommendations, and personalization.
• Develop microservices to support multiple services within search and science teams.
• Provide technical leadership, build cross-discipline partnerships, and deliver reliable solutions.
• Write code and develop search & recommendation services, data ingestion, and indexing pipelines.
• Collaborate with architects, engineers, data analysts, data scientists, and PMs to build Elasticsearch stack solutions.
• Integrate ML ranking models, NLP, and query-understanding into search workflows.
• Work on large-scale search, discovery, typeahead (auto-suggest), personalization, and recommendation systems.
• Influence priorities, mentor juniors, review code, and ensure sprint delivery.
• Drive re-engineering of systems and migration from legacy to next-gen architectures.
• Take end-to-end ownership of design, development, production launch, and support.
• Participate in design reviews and on-call rotations for production systems.

Education and Experience

• 8+ years of hands-on software development (preferably Java), architecture, and technical mentorship.
• 8+ years in search technologies (Elasticsearch, Solr, Lucene) with focus on relevancy and query optimization.
• 8+ years building microservices, REST APIs, and data ingestion workers.
• 8+ years using databases like SQL Server, DynamoDB, Redis, and other NoSQL DBs.
• Experience in Vector Search, Generative AI, Conversational Search preferred.
• Expertise in system design, OOP, TDD, and distributed architecture.
• Familiar with ILM, data streams, transforms, CCR, and Elasticsearch infrastructure.
• Strong background in Spring, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, distributed caching, and CI/CD.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and influencing skills.