Job Role: Lead/Principal Search Engineer (Hands-on) Duration: Long-Term # of positions: One (1) Work Mode: Remote Work Authorization: US Citizens, Green Card, H4-EAD, OPT-EAD, H1-EAD Employment Type: W2 and Contract-To-Hire # of Relevant Experience: 14-15 years Client: Large eCommerce Retailer (Key skills: Java, Microservices, Elasticsearch / Solr) Job Description: Essential Function and Responsibilities: • Design and architect search & recommendations platform, work on Next Generation architecture in addition to supporting and maintaining current platforms including legacy systems • Focus on improving search relevance, ranking and recommendations, personalization architecture • Microservices development to support the many services within search and science teams. • Provide technical leadership within the team and build partnerships with cross-discipline team members • Write code and develop search & recommendation services, data ingestion indexing pipelines • Work with stakeholders throughout the organization to identify opportunities for leveraging company data to drive search, discovery, and recommendations. • Work closely with other architects, engineers, data analysts, data scientists and project managers in assessing project requirements, design, develop and support data ingestions, API services and Elasticsearch stack solution • Work with Data Scientists in integrating ML Ranking models, NLP and applying query understanding techniques in search • Proven work on large-scale search, discovery, typeahead (auto-suggest), personalization, and recommendation implementation and its related infrastructure • Able to influence on priorities working with various partners including engineers, project management office and leadership • Mentor junior team members, define architecture, code review, hands-on development and deliver the work in sprint cycle • Participate in design discussions and other team members for the design of new systems and re-engineering of components of existing systems • Wear Architect hat when required to bring new ideas to the table based on past experience, thought leadership and forward thinking • Take holistic approach to building solutions by thinking big picture and overall solution • Perform a/b tests, work with Data Analysts and Data Scientists in evaluating the impact of search / recommendation improvements • Work on moving away from legacy systems into next generation architecture • Take complete ownership from requirements, solution design, development, production launch and post launch production support. Participate in regular on-call rotations. Education and Experience: • BS or MS in Computer Science (or related field) with 12-15 years of hands-on software development (preferably in Java), architecture and technical mentorship experience • 10+ years of experience in search technologies such as Elasticsearch / Solr / Lucene. Ideal candidate should have knowledge and experience in search relevancy advance techniques & query understanding. • 10+ years of experience in building microservices / Rest APIs and data ingestion workers • 10+ years of experience in using databases such as SQL Server, Dynamo, Redis and other NoSQL DBs • Nice to have experience in doing Vector Search using embeddings generated by ML models, Generative AI and conversational search • Experience in building large scale multi-region, fault-tolerant and resilient system • Software engineering skills in system architecture & design, coding, OOP, test driven development • Experience with multi-node clustering, ETL, monitoring of systems and APIs. • Knowledge of hot/warm/cold data, ILM (Index LifeCycle policies), Data streams, Transforms, CCR and other infrastructure aspect of services and Elasticsearch • Strong experience in building microservices, REST principles and design patterns • In-depth knowledge of Java, Docker, RESTful web services, Spring, Distributed caching techniques, Kubernetes, Observability techniques, Kafka, Release processes, versioning, Akamai, B&D, CI/CD pipelines, caching strategies • Phenomenal communication and influencing skills Nice to have: • Knowledge of Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese language would be an added advantage • Machine learning background in using ML in search, Learning to Rank, NLP, Generative AI, LLM models • Experience in Vector search / semantic search using vector search engines. • Experience in building real time indexing pipelines, Scala, Spark and other Big Data technologies. Supervisory Responsibilities: None, but may assist in mentoring others and leading projects