Senior Search Architect — IT App Dev IV (Remote)

The Fountain Group; Charlotte (NC); Hybrid; USD 229,233,000 - 249,290,000; Full time

Job summary

The Fountain Group is seeking a Search Engineer (IT App Dev IV) for a 6-month contract in Charlotte, NC, with remote flexibility for commutable in-person meetings. Responsibilities include leading design, tuning, and operation of the search layer using Lucidworks Fusion or similar platforms, and delivering scalable index/query pipelines across web, content, and AI platforms.

Requirements include 5+ years in search engineering, hands-on experience with Fusion/Solr/Elasticsearch, and strong

Qualifications

• 5+ years in search engineering, information retrieval, or enterprise app development.
• Hands-on experience with Lucidworks Fusion or comparable platforms (Solr/Lucene, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Algolia, Vespa, Azure AI Search).
• Proficiency in Java and/or Python, JSON, HTTP APIs, Git, automated testing, and CI/CD.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, build, tuning, and operation of the search layer.
• Translate customer and business needs into scalable index and query pipelines.
• Design and implement collections, schemas, connectors, index/query pipelines, query profiles, and REST API integrations in Lucidworks Fusion or an equivalent platform.
• Build and tune lexical, semantic, vector, and neural hybrid retrieval, including embeddings, blend weights, thresholds, boosting, filters, facets, synonyms, and fallback behavior.
• Use signals and behavioral data to improve relevance, recommendations, personalization, and popular or successful results.
• Create relevance benchmarks, automated regression tests, citation and grounding tests, latency targets, and per-query cost measures.
• Troubleshoot ingestion, indexing, Solr, Kubernetes/AWS, APIs, pipelines, model endpoints, and front-end integrations.
• Engineer single-turn and multi-turn search flows with intent recognition, entity extraction, query rewriting, clarification, and session context.
• Implement grounded RAG that retrieves approved sources, cites evidence, and suppresses or falls back when evidence or confidence is insufficient.
• Integrate with enterprise LLM services and Corning's AI Gateway using prompt controls, model configuration, rate limits, error handling, latency budgets, and cost governance.
• Tune experiences for product numbers, specifications, availability, certificates, manuals, application notes, and related content.
• Apply guardrails for transactional or product-SKU queries, low-confidence grounding, and zero-result scenarios.
• Partnership with AEM and front-end engineers to deliver accessible search results, conversational answers, and facets aligned with the Corning Design System.
• Manage Fusion configuration as code through GitLab, peer review, automated testing, and CI/CD practices.
• Instrument click-through, zero-result, no-click, reformulation, abandonment, task completion, latency, and pipeline-health metrics.
• Produce architecture diagrams, deployment documentation, runbooks, configuration standards, and knowledge-transfer materials.
• Work with security, privacy, legal, architecture, product, content, and business teams on access controls, data handling, AI guardrails, and release readiness.
• Participate in Corning's AI-DLC and Agile delivery cadence.

Skills

Search engineering

Information retrieval

Contextual search

Backlog item formulation

Communication with stakeholders

Problem solving

Tools

Lucidworks Fusion

Solr/Lucene

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Algolia

Vespa

Azure AI Search

Java

Python

JSON

HTTP APIs

Git

CI/CD

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

The Fountain Group is seeking a Search Engineer (IT App Dev IV) for a 6-month contract in Charlotte, NC, with remote flexibility for commutable in-person meetings. Responsibilities include leading design, tuning, and operation of the search layer using Lucidworks Fusion or similar platforms, and delivering scalable index/query pipelines across web, content, and AI platforms.

Requirements include 5+ years in search engineering, hands-on experience with Fusion/Solr/Elasticsearch, and strong