Lead Production Search Architect

Jobtailor; Minnesota; On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobtailor seeks a senior engineering leader to own end-to-end delivery of major search and retrieval projects. You will act as the technical lead for a squad of 3–5 engineers, setting direction, reviewing designs, and unblocking the team while partnering with applied scientists.

You will design retrieval architectures, build pipelines, and implement ranking and RAG workflows on AWS, OpenSearch, and Vespa, influencing architecture and roadmap decisions with a strong emphasis on production quality.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building production software with search, retrieval, or ranking systems.
• Experience leading technical projects and influencing architecture across teams.
• Hands-on production expertise with OpenSearch or Vespa (or Elasticsearch/Solr/Lucene).
• Experience designing search experiments, relevance metrics, and online/offline evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery of major search and retrieval projects, including live-system health.
• Act as technical lead for a squad of 3–5 engineers, setting direction and removing blockers.
• Partner with applied scientists to feed research insights into production.
• Run exploration to PoC to production, deciding what to pursue.
• Design and build retrieval architectures, ingestion/indexing pipelines, and ranking systems.

Skills

Python

Team Leadership

Search Experiments

OpenSearch

Vespa

AWS Production APIs

Distributed Systems

A/B Testing

Vector Search

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or related

Tools

AWS

OpenSearch

Vespa

Elasticsearch

Solr

Lucene

Job description

Jobtailor seeks a senior engineering leader to own end-to-end delivery of major search and retrieval projects. You will act as the technical lead for a squad of 3–5 engineers, setting direction, reviewing designs, and unblocking the team while partnering with applied scientists.

You will design retrieval architectures, build pipelines, and implement ranking and RAG workflows on AWS, OpenSearch, and Vespa, influencing architecture and roadmap decisions with a strong emphasis on production quality.