Search Engineer; Staffing - IT App Developer IV

We are a national staffing firm and are currently seeking a Search Engineer (IT App Dev IV) for a prominent client of ours. This position is in Charlotte, NC. Can be remote within a commutable distance to be in for meetings occasionally.

• Pay: $80 - $87.
• 6-month assignment, possible extension based on budget and performance.
• Lead the design, build, tuning, and operation of the search layer. The role delivers secure, grounded, and supportable conversational search using Lucidworks Fusion or a comparable enterprise search platform, with an initial single-turn answer experience followed by multi-turn conversational search.
• Translate customer and business needs into scalable index and query pipelines across web, content, commerce, and AI platforms. This contract role is an alternative to external professional services and requires hands-on technical delivery as well as solution leadership.
• Search Platform and Retrieval Engineering.
• 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.
• Conversational Search and Generative AI.
• 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 support content.
• Apply guardrails for transactional or product-SKU queries, low-confidence grounding, and zero-result scenarios.
• Integration, Delivery, and Operations
• Partner with AEM and front-end engineers to deliver accessible search results, conversational answers, follow-up suggestions, and facets aligned with the Corning Design System.
• Manage Fusion configuration as code through Git Lab, 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.

• 5+ years in search engineering, information retrieval, or enterprise application development, with substantial experience in Lucidworks Fusion or comparable platforms such as Solr/Lucene, Elasticsearch/Open Search, Algolia, Vespa, or Azure AI Search.
• Hands-on knowledge of schemas, analyzers, tokenization, synonyms, faceting, boosting, filtering, relevance scoring, query debugging, connectors, signals, custom pipeline stages, and REST APIs.
• Practical experience with semantic search, embeddings, approximate…