Lead Semantic Search Engineer - OpenSearch & Hybrid

BigCommerce Pty.; Austin (TX); Hybrid; USD 163,000 - 244,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

BigCommerce Pty. in Austin, TX is seeking a Lead Software Engineer, Search to pioneer semantic and hybrid search capabilities. You will architect and scale OpenSearch-based solutions, shaping relevance and embeddings while owning core data ingestion and indexing pipelines.

You will lead and mentor engineers, ensuring ultra-low latency and high availability under heavy traffic, with a hybrid in-office/remote work model in the Austin area.

Qualifications

• Proven experience building semantic search and hybrid retrieval systems.
• Leadership or staff-level experience in software engineering.
• Strong backend skills in a typed language (Go/Java/Scala) and familiarity with PHP.

Responsibilities

• Architect semantic search capabilities leveraging OpenSearch.
• Tune relevance, ranking models, and neural search configurations.
• Maintain data ingestion and indexing pipelines (MySQL, Kafka/RabbitMQ).
• Mentor engineers and drive engineering best practices.

Skills

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

Semantic search

Hybrid search

Backend fundamentals

Technical leadership

On-call

Tools

MySQL

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Docker

Kubernetes

OpenSearch Neural Search plugin

Job description

BigCommerce Pty. in Austin, TX is seeking a Lead Software Engineer, Search to pioneer semantic and hybrid search capabilities. You will architect and scale OpenSearch-based solutions, shaping relevance and embeddings while owning core data ingestion and indexing pipelines.

You will lead and mentor engineers, ensuring ultra-low latency and high availability under heavy traffic, with a hybrid in-office/remote work model in the Austin area.