Enterprise Search Tech Lead

Job Description:

Enterprise Search Tech Lead

Collaborate with Innovative 3

Mers Around the World

Choosing where to start and grow your career has a major impact on your professional and personal life, so it's equally important you know that the company that you choose to work at, and its leaders, will support and guide you. With a wide variety of people, global locations, technologies and products, 3M is a place where you can collaborate with other curious, creative 3

Mers.

This position provides an opportunity to transition from other private, public, government or military experience to a 3M career

The Impact You'll Make in this Role

As an enterprise search tech lead, you will have the opportunity to tap into your curiosity and collaborate with some of the most innovative people around the world. Here, you will make an impact by:

* Leading design, development, and optimization of enterprise search solutions built on AWS Open Search to improve relevance, scalability, and AI-readiness across digital platforms.

* Owning technical decisions across the full search stack: ingestion pipelines (Spring Boot/Batch, Kafka), search APIs, index design, and infrastructure-as-code.

* Driving platform evolution toward hybrid retrieval (lexical + semantic/vector search) to support RAG, LLM grounding, and agentic AI use cases.

* Creating and maintaining comprehensive technical documentation including C4 architecture models, system design diagrams, and operational runbooks.

* Mentoring and leading developers on the search engineering team, conducting code reviews, and raising engineering standards.

* Partnering with the domain architect on long-term strategy while independently executing complex platform changes.

* Building and maintaining Airflow-orchestrated ingestion workflows, monitoring/alerting systems, and CI/CD pipelines.

* Supporting cross-functional teams by troubleshooting search issues, monitoring system health, and partnering with consuming applications (product navigator, digital commerce, AI assistants).

* Willingness to be on-call in the event of critical issues requiring timely resolution.

Your Skills and Expertise

To set you up for success in this role from day one, 3M requires (at a minimum) the following qualifications:

* Bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, information systems, or Technology field (completed and verified prior to start).

* Five (5) years of search-related development experience in a private, public, government, or military environment.

* Seven (7) years of overall software engineering experience in a private, public, government or military environment

Additional qualifications that could help you succeed even further in this role include:

* Experience with AWS Open Search/Elasticsearch: index design, analyzers/tokenizers, synonyms, aggregations, relevance tuning, and performance optimization.

* Experience with Java 17+, Spring Boot, Spring Batch, and multi-module Maven projects.

* Experience with Kafka/MSK messaging - producers, consumers, and stream processing.

* Experience with AWS services (S3, IAM, Lambda, MSK, ECS, Cloud Watch, EFS).

* Strong understanding of search fundamentals (BM25, relevance tuning, autocomplete, vector search).

* Experience with embeddings, vector databases, or RAG pipelines for LLM applications.

* Experience building and operating Airflow DAGs for data pipeline orchestration.

* Experience modernizing legacy search platforms or migrating between search engine versions.

* Familiarity with search analytics, A/B testing for ranking, and relevance measurement (NDCG, MRR)

* Demonstrated ability to document complex systems - C4 model, architecture decision records, or equivalent.

Work location:

* Work location:

Maplewood, MN or Austin, Texas

Travel:
May include up to 10% domestic/international

Relocation:
May be authorized

Must be legally authorized to work in country of employment without sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., H1B status).

Supporting Your Well-being

3M offers many programs to help you live your best life - both physically and financially. To ensure competitive pay and benefits, 3M regularly benchmarks with other companies that are comparable in size and scope.

Chat with Max

For assistance with searching through our current job openings or for more information about all things 3M, visit Max, our virtual recruiting assistant on

Applicable to US Applicants Only:

The expected compensation range for this position is $145,676 - $178,049, which includes base pay plus variable incentive pay, if eligible. This range represents a good faith estimate for this position. The specific compensation offered to a candidate may vary based on factors including, but not limited to, the candidate's relevant knowledge, training, skills, work location, and/or experience. In addition, this position may be eligible for a range of benefits (e.g., Medical, Dental & Vision, Health Savings Accounts, Health Care & Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts, Disability Benefits, Life Insurance,…