Senior IT App Developer – AI-Powered Search & Fusion

TALENT Software Services; Charlotte (NC); On-site; USD 85,000 - 125,000; Full time

Job summary

Talent Software Services in Charlotte, NC seeks an experienced IT App Developer IV to design and operate a secure, scalable search layer across web and content platforms, leveraging Lucidworks Fusion or similar. This hands-on role focuses on turning customer needs into robust indexing pipelines and production-ready solutions.

You will collaborate with architecture, product, and front-end teams, implement grounded RAG, manage configurations as code, and drive measurable improvements in relevance,

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Data Science, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in search engineering, information retrieval, or enterprise application development, including Lucidworks Fusion or a comparable enterprise search platform.
• Hands-on expertise with search schemas, analyzers, tokenization, synonyms, facets, boosting, filtering, relevance scoring, query debugging, connectors, signals, custom pipeline stages, and REST APIs.
• Practical experience with semantic search, embeddings, approximate nearest-neighbor retrieval, neural hybrid ranking, relevance evaluation, RAG, grounding, prompt design, citations, guardrails, and fallback patterns.
• Experience with multi-turn context, session design, intent classification, and entity extraction.
• Experience deploying or operating search workloads on AWS and Kubernetes, including observability and production troubleshooting.
• Proficiency in Java and/or Python, JSON, APIs, Git, automated testing, and CI/CD.
• Ability to turn customer journeys and business needs into technical designs, backlog items, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes.
• Strong communication with technical and nontechnical stakeholders, with the ability to work independently, prioritize competing work, resolve ambiguity, and transfer knowledge.
• Preferred: Fusion 5.x implementation, upgrade, or administration experience in a self-hosted environment.
• Preferred: Experience with Fusion AI, RAY, Learning-to-Rank, Relevance Workbench, Analytics Studio, Commerce Studio, A/B testing, or comparable capabilities.
• Preferred: Integration experience with AEM as a Cloud Service, commerce, product catalogs, digital assets, or certificate and document services.
• Preferred: Knowledge of Redis or another session store, multilingual search, part-number/SKU handling, permissions-aware retrieval, and blending structured with unstructured content.
• Preferred: Experience in compliance-sensitive or document-intensive environments and familiarity with accessibility, privacy, secure and responsible AI development, and production monitoring.
• Preferred: Relevant search, cloud, or AI certifications.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, implementation, tuning, and operation of the search layer, translating customer and business needs into scalable indexing and query pipelines across web, content, commerce, and AI platforms.
• Configure collections, schemas, connectors, indexing and query pipelines, query profiles, and REST API integrations in Lucidworks Fusion or an equivalent platform.
• Build and optimize lexical, semantic, vector, and neural hybrid retrieval, including embeddings, ranking weights, thresholds, boosting, filters, facets, synonyms, and fallback behavior.
• Use signals and behavioral data to improve relevance, recommendations, personalization, and popular or successful results.
• Establish relevance benchmarks, automated regression tests, citation and grounding checks, latency targets, and per-query cost measures.
• Troubleshoot ingestion, indexing, Solr, Kubernetes/AWS, APIs, pipelines, model endpoints, and front-end integrations.
• Develop single-turn and multi-turn search flows using intent recognition, entity extraction, query rewriting, clarification, and session context.
• Implement grounded RAG that retrieves approved sources, cites supporting evidence, and suppresses answers or falls back when evidence or confidence is insufficient.
• Integrate enterprise LLM services and the clients AI Gateway, managing prompt controls, model configuration, rate limits, error handling, latency budgets, and cost governance.
• Tune search experiences for product numbers, specifications, availability, certificates, manuals, application notes, and related support content; apply guardrails to transactional and product-SKU searches, low-confidence results, and zero-result scenarios.
• Partner with AEM and front-end engineers to deliver accessible results, conversational answers, follow-up suggestions, and facets aligned with the clients Design System.
• Manage Fusion configuration as code through GitLab, peer review, automated testing, and CI/CD practices.
• Track click-through, zero-result, no-click, reformulation, abandonment, task completion, latency, and pipeline-health metrics.
• Prepare architecture diagrams, deployment documentation, runbooks, configuration standards, and knowledge-transfer materials.
• Coordinate with security, privacy, legal, architecture, product, content, and business teams on access controls, data handling, AI guardrails, and release readiness.
• Participate in the clients AI-DLC and Agile delivery cadence.
• Deliver production-ready architecture for lexical, semantic, hybrid, and conversational search, along with grounded conversational pipelines that retain context, identify intent and entities, cite evidence, and apply appropriate fallback behavior.
• Provide operational dashboards and alerts, relevance benchmarks, regression tests, runbooks, deployment documentation, and knowledge transfer to support sustainable ownership.
• Improve judged relevance and multi-turn task completion while reducing zero-result, reformulation, and abandonment rates, and maintaining acceptable latency, monitoring, and recoverability.

Skills

Communication

Independent work

Backlog management

Technical design

Multitasking

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

Lucidworks Fusion

AWS

Kubernetes

REST APIs

Git

CI/CD

Python

Java

Job description

Talent Software Services in Charlotte, NC seeks an experienced IT App Developer IV to design and operate a secure, scalable search layer across web and content platforms, leveraging Lucidworks Fusion or similar. This hands-on role focuses on turning customer needs into robust indexing pipelines and production-ready solutions.

You will collaborate with architecture, product, and front-end teams, implement grounded RAG, manage configurations as code, and drive measurable improvements in relevance,