Lead Software Engineer, Search; Semantic Platform

Position: Lead Software Engineer, Search (Semantic Platform)
## Lead Software Engineer, Search (Semantic Platform)
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Hybrid locations:
Austin, TXtime type:
Full time posted on:
Posted Yesterday job requisition :
JR102797#
** Welcome to the Agentic Commerce Era**## At Commerce, our mission is to empower businesses to innovate, grow, and thrive with our open, AI-driven commerce ecosystem. As the parent company of Big Commerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift, we connect the tools and systems that power growth, enabling businesses to unlock the full potential of their data, deliver seamless and personalized experiences across every channel, and adapt swiftly to an ever-changing market.

We believe in harnessing AI responsibly to unlock new possibilities, and we’re looking for individuals who use it intentionally to solve problems, accelerate outcomes, and expand what’s possible in their role. Our purpose is to help businesses confidently solve complex commerce challenges so they can build smarter, adapt faster, and grow on their own terms. If you want to be part of a team of bold builders, sharp thinkers, and technical trailblazers who shape the future of commerce, this is the place for you.

We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer, Search to pioneer the next evolution of our search infrastructure. In this role, you won't just be maintaining query pipelines; you will be responsible for building, iterating, and scaling semantic search via hybrid search on Open Search as a core, foundational platform capability.

As the technical lead for this initiative, you will architect the systems that blend traditional keyword matching with deep semantic understanding. You will own the strategy for integrating vector embeddings, neural search, and dense/sparse hybrid retrieval, directly impacting how users discover data across our entire ecosystem. If you are a hands-on technical leader who loves Open Search, relevancy tuning, and building high-throughput, foundational capabilities, we want you in our Austin hub.

Big Commerce, part of the Commerce brand family, helps merchants increase sales at every stage of their growth. From small startups to mid-market businesses and large enterprises, we provide the leading e-commerce platform. Our customers can then concentrate on what's most important: growing their businesses. We enable our customers to build, innovate, and grow, collectively reshaping the e-commerce industry.
** What You’ll Do**
* ** Architect the Future of Search:
** Lead the design and implementation of semantic search capabilities, utilizing Open Search to build a robust, hybrid search (BM25 + vector) capability from the ground up
* ** Iterate & Optimize:
** Continuously evaluate, benchmark, and fine-tune search relevance, ranking models, and k-NN/neural search configurations within Open Search
* ** Own the Indexing Pipeline:
** Maintain, scale, and evolve our core data ingestion and indexing pipelines (built on MySQL, Kafka/RabbitMQ, and backend microservices) to seamlessly support dense vector ingestion and de-duplicated, resilient synchronization
* ** Technical Leadership:
** Guide the technical roadmap for the Search team, establish engineering best practices, and mentor senior and mid-level engineers through complex architectural decisions
* ** Production Excellence:
** Ensure the search platform meets ultra-low latency requirements and high-availability SLAs under massive, concurrent traffic loads while participating in the team's on-call rotation
** Who Are You**
* *
* Experience:

** 7+ years of professional software development experience, with a proven track record in a technical leadership or staff-level capacity
* ** Open Search/Elasticsearch Expertise:
** Deep hands-on experience building, scaling, and fine-tuning Open Search (or Elasticsearch) clusters at scale
* ** Semantic & Hybrid Search:
** Proven experience implementing semantic search, working with text embeddings, vector databases, and configuring hybrid search scoring models
* ** Strong Backend Fundamentals:
** High proficiency in a strongly typed language like GoLang, Scala, or Java, alongside experience with languages like PHP
* ** Data Pipelines:
** Strong experience with relational databases (MySQL),…