Principal Architect - Search, Retrieval & Knowledge Discovery

Evolution USA; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Evolution USA is seeking a Principal Architect to lead the strategy and architecture behind search, retrieval and intelligent information access. You will define how users discover, navigate and interact with complex data through modern retrieval and knowledge platforms, interfacing with AI and platform teams to shape long-term technical direction.

This is a high-impact role requiring deep experience with large-scale data systems and cutting-edge retrieval techniques, with a hands-on leadership

Qualifications

• Experience in search, information retrieval or knowledge discovery.
• Experience with semantic search, vector search and modern retrieval techniques.
• Strong software engineering and architecture skills.
• Experience with large datasets and complex information models.
• Ability to influence architecture across multiple teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture for search, retrieval and knowledge discovery platforms.
• Design semantic, vector and hybrid retrieval systems.
• Define search architecture across structured and unstructured datasets.
• Drive metadata, indexing and information discovery strategies.
• Partner with AI and platform engineering teams on retrieval-enabled applications.
• Improve relevance, ranking and search quality.
• Influence long-term technical strategy in search and knowledge systems.

Skills

Search architecture

Information retrieval

Distributed systems

Software engineering

Leadership

Tools

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Lucene/Solr

Vector search

Weaviate/Pinecone/Milvus

Job description

A rapidly growing scientific data and AI company is building next-generation discovery and knowledge systems and is seeking a Principal Architect to lead the strategy and architecture behind search, retrieval and intelligent information access.

This role sits at the intersection of search, metadata, AI and large-scale distributed systems. You will define how users discover, navigate and interact with complex data through modern retrieval and knowledge platforms.

What you'll do

• Lead architecture for search, retrieval and knowledge discovery platforms
• Design semantic, vector and hybrid retrieval systems
• Define search architecture across structured and unstructured datasets
• Drive metadata, indexing and information discovery strategies
• Partner with AI and platform engineering teams on retrieval-enabled applications
• Improve relevance, ranking and search quality
• Influence long-term technical strategy in search and knowledge systems

What we're looking for:

• Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Principal Architect or Search Architect experience
• Strong background in search, information retrieval or knowledge discovery
• Experience with semantic search, vector search and modern retrieval techniques
• Strong software engineering and architecture skills
• Experience working with large datasets and complex information models
• Ability to influence architecture across multiple teams

Technologies and concepts that may be relevant:

Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Lucene, Solr, Vector Search, Semantic Search, Information Retrieval, Search Relevance, Ranking, Reranking, Hybrid Search, Embeddings, RAG, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Knowledge Graphs, Metadata Architecture, Ontologies, Taxonomies, Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, Vespa, Qdrant, pgvector, Distributed Systems, Data Platforms.

This is a unique opportunity to define how users discover and interact with information across a rapidly expanding data ecosystem. You'll be tackling some of the most interesting challenges in search, retrieval, metadata, knowledge representation and AI-powered discovery, working with modern technologies to build capabilities that sit at the heart of the platform.

If you're passionate about solving difficult retrieval and knowledge discovery problems and want to own the technical vision for a strategic area of the business, we'd welcome a confidential conversation.