Lead Research Engineer, Search & Retrieval

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

• Own end-to-end delivery of significant search and retrieval projects, including outcome, quality, timeline, and live-system health
• Act as technical lead for a squad of 3–5 engineers by setting direction, breaking down work, reviewing designs and code, and unblocking the team
• Partner with applied scientists and feed production evidence back into research
• Run the exploration -> POC -> proof of value -> productionization loop and determine what to pursue
• Design and build retrieval architectures, ingestion and indexing pipelines, and ranking and re-ranking systems on OpenSearch and Vespa
• Build retrieval infrastructure and search agents for agentic AI workflows, including retrieval APIs, agentic query planning, multi-step retrieval, RAG pipelines, hybrid and semantic retrieval, and query understanding
• Build offline relevance harnesses, golden and labeled sets, online A/B tests, and end-to-end agent quality measurement
• Diagnose retrieval and agent quality failures across the pipeline
• Build and operate production APIs and backend services on AWS
• Identify and communicate timeline and architecture risks
• Influence architecture decisions through design reviews, partner-team alignment, and mentorship

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• ~7+ years building production software, including search, retrieval, or ranking systems that were shipped and owned
• Proven track record leading technical projects, delivering through other engineers, and influencing architecture across teams
• Deep hands-on production expertise in OpenSearch or Vespa, or comparable depth in Elasticsearch, Solr, or Lucene
• Experience designing search experiments, relevance and ranking metrics, offline evaluation harnesses, and online A/B measurement
• Outstanding software engineering skills in Python
• Routine use of agentic coding tools with judgment about validating their output
• Experience designing, operating, and scaling production APIs and large-scale distributed systems on AWS
• Knowledge of indexing and ingestion at large-corpus scale, vector search, embeddings, semantic and hybrid retrieval, and production RAG infrastructure
• Track record collaborating with applied scientists or ML practitioners and productionizing their models and approaches

Core Competencies

Demonstrates expertise in building and operating search and retrieval systems, with a strong focus on OpenSearch, Vespa, and AWS. Proven ability to lead technical projects, mentor teams, and influence architectural decisions while ensuring high-quality outcomes.

Highest-signal resume keywords

• OpenSearch Expertise
• Production API Development
• Search Experiment Design
• Python Software Engineering
• Technical Project Leadership

ATS Optimization Keywords

Hard Skills

• Search Systems Development
• Retrieval Architecture Design
• Ranking Systems Implementation
• Distributed Systems Engineering
• Indexing and Ingestion Techniques
• Relevance Metrics Evaluation
• Agentic Coding Tools Usage
• A/B Testing Methodologies
• Vector Search Knowledge
• Hybrid Retrieval Techniques

Soft Skills

• Team Leadership
• Mentorship
• Collaboration
• Communication

Industry Keywords

• Search and Retrieval
• Machine Learning Collaboration
• Productionization
• Quality Measurement
• Agentic AI Workflows

Tools & Technologies

• AWS
• OpenSearch
• Vespa
• Elasticsearch
• Solr
• Lucene