Lead Software Engineer, Semantic Search & OpenSearch

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

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

Commerce is seeking a Lead Software Engineer for Search (Semantic Platform) in Austin, TX. You will architect and scale semantic and hybrid search capabilities using OpenSearch, blending BM25 with vector-based ranking across data in MySQL and streaming pipelines.

You’ll lead architectural decisions, optimize latency, and mentor senior engineers while working in a hybrid Austin office environment. Strong backend skills in Go/Java/Scala and experience with data pipelines are essential.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software development experience.
• Deep hands-on OpenSearch/Elasticsearch expertise.
• Experience with semantic and hybrid search, vector embeddings, and dense/sparse retrieval.
• Strong backend in Go, Java, or Scala; PHP experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Architect semantic search capabilities using OpenSearch for hybrid search.
• Iterate, benchmark, and tune relevance and neural search configurations.
• Own indexing pipeline with MySQL, Kafka/RabbitMQ, and microservices for vector data.
• Mentor engineers and drive engineering best practices.
• Ensure ultra-low latency and high availability under heavy traffic.

Skills

OpenSearch

Elasticsearch

Semantic search

Hybrid search

Go

Java

Scala

PHP

MySQL

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Distributed systems

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

MySQL

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Job description

Commerce is seeking a Lead Software Engineer for Search (Semantic Platform) in Austin, TX. You will architect and scale semantic and hybrid search capabilities using OpenSearch, blending BM25 with vector-based ranking across data in MySQL and streaming pipelines.

You’ll lead architectural decisions, optimize latency, and mentor senior engineers while working in a hybrid Austin office environment. Strong backend skills in Go/Java/Scala and experience with data pipelines are essential.