Lead Software Engineer, Search; Semantic Platform

Overview

Commerce empowers businesses to innovate, grow, and thrive with an open, AI-driven commerce ecosystem. As the parent company of Big Commerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift, we connect tools and systems that power growth, unlock data potential, deliver personalized experiences across channels, and adapt to a changing market. We harness AI responsibly to solve problems, accelerate outcomes, and enable teams to grow on their own terms.

We seek bold builders, sharp thinkers, and technical trailblazers who shape the future of commerce.

We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer, Search to pioneer the next evolution of our search infrastructure. In this role, you will build, iterate, and scale semantic search via hybrid search on Open Search as a core platform capability.

As the technical lead for this initiative, you will architect 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 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 growth stage. From startups to large enterprises, we provide the leading e-commerce platform so customers can focus on growing their businesses. We enable our customers to build, innovate, and grow, reshaping the e-commerce industry together.

• Architect the Future of Search:
  Lead the design and implementation of semantic search capabilities using Open Search to build a robust hybrid search (BM25 + vector) 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 core data ingestion and indexing pipelines (built on MySQL, Kafka/RabbitMQ, and backend microservices) to 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 on-call rotation

• 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 typed languages such as Go, Scala, or Java, with experience in languages like PHP
• Data Pipelines:
  Experience with relational databases (MySQL), schema design, and distributed messaging tools (Kafka or RabbitMQ) for heavy data mutation and indexing
• Location:
  
  Based in or willing to relocate to the Austin, TX area and comfortable working in a hybrid environment

• Familiarity with the Open Search Neural Search plugin, k-NN search, or Learning to Rank (LTR)
• Experience migrating large-scale search infrastructure to Open Search semantic implementations
• Experience setting up automated search quality measurement frameworks (e.g., NDCG, MRR)
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) in a cloud environment

Work Where You Thrive:
For candidates in the Austin metro area, the position follows a hybrid model with three days per week in the office, balancing focused individual work with collaboration.

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(Pay Transparency Range: $ - $)

The national base salary range for this role is posted above in this job post.…