Lead Search Engineer: Semantic OpenSearch Hybrid

Bigcommerce; Austin (TX); Hybrid; USD 163,000 - 244,000; Full time

Job summary

Commerce is seeking a Lead Software Engineer, Search in Austin to pioneer the next evolution of our search infrastructure. You will architect and scale semantic search via a hybrid OpenSearch-based system, blending BM25 with vector embeddings and dense/sparse retrieval across the Commerce ecosystem.

You will lead the Search team, shaping the technical roadmap, tuning relevance, and ensuring ultra-low latency and high availability under massive concurrent traffic.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software development experience with leadership capabilities.
• Deep hands-on OpenSearch/Elasticsearch experience at scale.
• Experience implementing semantic and hybrid search with vector embeddings.
• Strong backend fundamentals in Go, Scala, or Java (experience with PHP is a plus).
• Experience with relational databases (MySQL) and distributed messaging (Kafka/RabbitMQ).

Responsibilities

• Architect semantic search capabilities using OpenSearch to build a robust hybrid search (BM25 + vector).
• Iterate, benchmark, and fine-tune relevance, ranking models, and neural search configurations.
• Own data ingestion and indexing pipelines with MySQL, Kafka/RabbitMQ, and microservices for dense vector ingestion.
• Provide technical leadership and mentor engineers on complex architectural decisions.
• Ensure ultra-low latency, high-availability search platform and participate in on-call rotation.

Skills

OpenSearch

Semantic search

Backend development

Distributed systems

Hybrid search

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

MySQL

OpenSearch

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Job description

Commerce is seeking a Lead Software Engineer, Search in Austin to pioneer the next evolution of our search infrastructure. You will architect and scale semantic search via a hybrid OpenSearch-based system, blending BM25 with vector embeddings and dense/sparse retrieval across the Commerce ecosystem.

You will lead the Search team, shaping the technical roadmap, tuning relevance, and ensuring ultra-low latency and high availability under massive concurrent traffic.