Enterprise Search Tech Lead

3M; Minnesota; On-site; USD 145,676 - 178,049; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental & Vision

Health Savings Accounts

Paid Absences

Job summary

3M is seeking an Enterprise Search Tech Lead to enhance enterprise search solutions on AWS OpenSearch. The role involves optimizing search relevance and AI-readiness across platforms.

Candidates should have a Bachelor's degree in a tech field, with at least five years of search-related experience. Preferred skills include AWS services and Java proficiency. This position is based in Maplewood, MN or Austin, TX, and offers competitive compensation and benefits.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science, information systems, or technology field.
• Five years of search-related development experience.
• Seven years of overall software engineering experience.

Responsibilities

• Leading design, development, and optimization of enterprise search solutions.
• Owning technical decisions across the search stack.
• Creating and maintaining comprehensive technical documentation.
• Mentoring and leading developers on the search engineering team.

Skills

Search-related development experience

Software engineering experience

AWS OpenSearch/Elasticsearch experience

Java 17+

Spring Boot

Experience with Kafka/MSK

Understanding of search fundamentals

Documenting complex systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, or technology field

Tools

AWS services

Airflow

Job description

Enterprise Search Tech Lead

Responsibilities

• Leading design, development, and optimization of enterprise search solutions built on AWS OpenSearch to improve relevance, scalability, and AI-readiness across digital platforms.
• Owning technical decisions across the full search stack: ingestion pipelines (Spring Boot/Batch, Kafka), search APIs, index design, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Driving platform evolution toward hybrid retrieval (lexical + semantic/vector search) to support RAG, LLM grounding, and agentic AI use cases.
• Creating and maintaining comprehensive technical documentation including C4 architecture models, system design diagrams, and operational runbooks.
• Mentoring and leading developers on the search engineering team, conducting code reviews, and raising engineering standards.
• Partnering with the domain architect on long-term strategy while independently executing complex platform changes.
• Building and maintaining Airflow-orchestrated ingestion workflows, monitoring/alerting systems, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Supporting cross-functional teams by troubleshooting search issues, monitoring system health, and partnering with consuming applications (product navigator, digital commerce, AI assistants).
• Willingness to be on‑call in the event of critical issues requiring timely resolution.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science, information systems, or technology field (completed and verified prior to start).
• Five years of search‑related development experience in a private, public, government, or military environment.
• Seven years of overall software engineering experience in a private, public, government or military environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AWS OpenSearch/Elasticsearch: index design, analyzers/tokenizers, synonyms, aggregations, relevance tuning, and performance optimization.
• Experience with Java 17+, Spring Boot, Spring Batch, and multi‑module Maven projects.
• Experience with Kafka/MSK messaging — producers, consumers, and stream processing.
• Experience with AWS services (S3, IAM, Lambda, MSK, ECS, CloudWatch, EFS).
• Strong understanding of search fundamentals (BM25, relevance tuning, autocomplete, vector search).
• Experience with embeddings, vector databases, or RAG pipelines for LLM applications.
• Experience building and operating Airflow DAGs for data pipeline orchestration.
• Experience modernizing legacy search platforms or migrating between search engine versions.
• Familiarity with search analytics, A/B testing for ranking, and relevance measurement (NDCG, MRR).
• Demonstrated ability to document complex systems — C4 model, architecture decision records, or equivalent.

Work Location

Maplewood, MN or Austin, Texas

Travel

May include up to 10% domestic/international.

Relocation

May be authorized.

Legal Authorization

Must be legally authorized to work in country of employment without sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., H1B status).

Compensation & Benefits

The expected compensation range for this position is $145,676 – $178,049, which includes base pay plus variable incentive pay, if eligible. This range represents a good faith estimate for this position. The specific compensation offered to a candidate may vary based on factors including, but not limited to, the candidate’s relevant knowledge, training, skills, work location, and/or experience.

Benefits may include: Medical, Dental & Vision, Health Savings Accounts, Health Care & Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts, Disability Benefits, Life Insurance, Voluntary Benefits, Paid Absences and Retirement Benefits, etc.

3M does not discriminate in hiring or employment on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, religion, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Responsibilities of this position include compliance with corporate policies, procedures and security standards while performing assigned duties.

Safety is a core value at 3M. All employees are expected to contribute to a strong Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) culture by following safety policies, identifying hazards, and engaging in continuous improvement.