Lead Software Engineer, Semantic Search

Commerce.com; United States; Teletrabalho; USD 182 000 - 259 000; Tempo integral

Resumo da oferta

Commerce is seeking a Lead Software Engineer, Search to pioneer the next evolution of our search infrastructure in the Austin hub. You will architect semantic search capabilities, blending traditional keyword matching with deep semantic understanding using OpenSearch, vector embeddings, and dense/sparse hybrid retrieval.

You will lead the Search team’s technical roadmap, optimize ranking models, and ensure ultra-low latency, high-availability performance under massive traffic.

Qualificações

• 7+ years of professional software development experience, with a proven track record in a technical leadership or staff-level capacity.
• OpenSearch/Elasticsearch Expertise: Deep hands-on experience building, scaling, and fine-tuning OpenSearch (or Elasticsearch) clusters at scale
• Semantic & Hybrid Search: Proven experience implementing semantic search, working with text embeddings, vector databases, and configuring hybrid search scoring models
• Strong Backend Fundamentals: High proficiency in a strongly typed language like GoLang, Scala, or Java, alongside experience with languages like PHP
• Data Pipelines: Strong experience with relational databases (MySQL), schema design, and distributed messaging tools (Kafka or RabbitMQ) for heavy data mutation and indexing
• Familiarity with the OpenSearch Neural Search plugin, k-NN search, or Learning to Rank (LTR)
• Experience migrating large-scale search infrastructure from traditional Elasticsearch configurations to advanced OpenSearch semantic implementations
• Experience setting up automated search quality measurement frameworks (e.g., NDCG, MRR)
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) in a cloud environment

Responsabilidades

• Architect the Future of Search: Lead the design and implementation of semantic search capabilities, utilizing OpenSearch to build a robust, hybrid search (BM25 + vector) capability from the ground up
• Iterate & Optimize: Continuously evaluate, benchmark, and fine-tune search relevance, ranking models, and k-NN/neural search configurations within OpenSearch
• Own the Indexing Pipeline: Maintain, scale, and evolve our core data ingestion and indexing pipelines (built on MySQL, Kafka/RabbitMQ, and backend microservices) to seamlessly support dense vector ingestion and de-duplicated, resilient synchronization
• Technical Leadership: Guide the technical roadmap for the Search team, establish engineering best practices, and mentor senior and mid-level engineers through complex architectural decisions
• Production Excellence: Ensure the search platform meets ultra-low latency requirements and high-availability SLAs under massive, concurrent traffic loads while participating in the team's on-call rotation

Conhecimentos

Technical leadership

OpenSearch expertise

Semantic search

Backend development

GoLang/Scala/Java

PHP

Data pipelines

Cloud tooling

Ferramentas

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka

RabbitMQ

MySQL

Vector embeddings

Descrição da oferta de emprego

Commerce is seeking a Lead Software Engineer, Search to pioneer the next evolution of our search infrastructure in the Austin hub. You will architect semantic search capabilities, blending traditional keyword matching with deep semantic understanding using OpenSearch, vector embeddings, and dense/sparse hybrid retrieval.

You will lead the Search team’s technical roadmap, optimize ranking models, and ensure ultra-low latency, high-availability performance under massive traffic.