Senior Search Engineer / Technical Lead

***W2 Contract***

Sr. Search Engineer/Tech. Lead

Remote work – Highest preference for candidates from Charlotte, NC, OR Corning, NY OR East Coast

6 months, extendable for long-term

Scope of Position:

• Lead the design, build, tuning, and operation of the search layer for Corning.com.
• 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.

Core Competencies:

Search engineering | Relevance optimization | Conversational AI | RAG and grounding | Systems integration | Production operations | Analytical problem solving | Cross-functional collaboration | Technical leadership

Working Relationships:

Collaborates with Enterprise Architecture, Digital Experience product owners, AEM/front-end engineering, commerce and product-data teams, AI platform teams, cloud operations, cybersecurity, privacy/legal, analytics, content owners, and implementation partners.

Required Education, Experience, and Skills:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Data Science, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 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/OpenSearch, 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 nearest-neighbor retrieval, neural hybrid ranking, relevance evaluation, RAG, grounding, prompt design, citations, guardrails, and fallback patterns.
• Experience with multi-turn context, session design, intent classification, and entity extraction.
• Experience deploying or operating search workloads in AWS and Kubernetes, including observability and production troubleshooting.
• Proficiency in Java and/or Python, JSON, HTTP APIs, Git, automated testing, and CI/CD.
• Ability to convert customer journeys and business requirements into technical designs, backlog items, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes.
• Clear communication with technical and nontechnical stakeholders; able to work independently, prioritize competing work, resolve ambiguity, and transfer knowledge.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Lucidworks Fusion 5.x implementation, upgrade, or administration experience in a self-hosted environment.
• Experience with Fusion AI, RAY, Learning-to-Rank, Relevance Workbench, Analytics Studio, Commerce Studio, A/B testing, or equivalent capabilities.
• Integration experience with AEM as a Cloud Service, commerce, product catalogs, digital assets, or certificate/document services.
• Knowledge of Redis or another session store; multilingual search; part-number/SKU handling; permissions-aware retrieval; and structured/unstructured content blending.
• Experience in compliance-sensitive or document-intensive environments, plus familiarity with accessibility, privacy, secure AI development, responsible AI, and production monitoring.
• Relevant search, cloud, or AI certifications.