Remote Lead Semantic Search Engineer - OpenSearch Hybrid

Makeswift; Austin, Atlanta (TX, GA); Hybrid; USD 182,000 - 259,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

Optional collaborative workspaces

Job summary

Commerce is seeking a Lead Software Engineer, Search (Semantic Platform) to architect and scale semantic search across our OpenSearch-based infrastructure. You will own the hybrid search stack, blending keyword and vector approaches, and guide the indexing pipelines built on MySQL, Kafka/RabbitMQ, and microservices.

You’ll lead a team of engineers, drive architectural decisions, and ensure ultra-low latency and high availability in a remote-first environment with optional collaboration spaces in

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software development with leadership experience.
• Deep hands-on OpenSearch/Elasticsearch expertise at scale.
• Experience implementing semantic and hybrid search and working with embeddings.
• Strong backend fundamentals in typed languages (Go/Java/Scala).
• MySQL data pipelines and distributed messaging (Kafka/RabbitMQ) experience.
• Familiarity with OpenSearch Neural Search, k-NN, or Learning to Rank (LTR).
• Experience migrating large OpenSearch-based search infra and measuring quality (NDCG, MRR).
• Containerization and orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Architect the future of semantic search using OpenSearch with BM25 + vector hybrid.
• Iterate, benchmark, and tune relevance and neural search configurations.
• Own indexing pipelines: ingestion, de-duplication, and synchronization.
• Provide technical leadership and establish best practices for the Search team.
• Ensure ultra-low latency, high-availability SLAs under heavy traffic, and participate in on-call rotation.

Skills

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

Semantic & Hybrid Search

Backend languages: Go/Java/Scala

MySQL data pipelines

Kafka/RabbitMQ messaging

Docker & Kubernetes

Vector embeddings / neural search

NDCG / MRR evaluation

Tools

OpenSearch Neural Search plugin

Job description

Commerce is seeking a Lead Software Engineer, Search (Semantic Platform) to architect and scale semantic search across our OpenSearch-based infrastructure. You will own the hybrid search stack, blending keyword and vector approaches, and guide the indexing pipelines built on MySQL, Kafka/RabbitMQ, and microservices.

You’ll lead a team of engineers, drive architectural decisions, and ensure ultra-low latency and high availability in a remote-first environment with optional collaboration spaces in