Role: Search Architect
Location: Chicago, IL. Open to REMOTE with occasional travel
W2 Position
Tops Skills:
1. Lucidworks Fusion
2. Apache Solr
3. Fusion pipelines, query workflows, collections, and connectors
| Name | Required | Experience |
| Lucidworks Fusion | Yes | 6 + Years | |
| LWF - Fusion App Studio | Yes | 6 + Years | |
| LWF - Index Pipeline | Yes | 6 + Years | |
| LWF - Query Pipeline | Yes | 6 + Years | |
| LWF - Rules editor | Yes | 6 + Years | |
| AWS Cloud | Yes | 6 + Years | |
| Apache Solr | Yes | 6 + Years | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Skillset Details:
Required
12+ years of enterprise search experience.
6+ years of Lucidworks Fusion implementation and support experience.
Strong expertise in Apache Solr architecture and administration.
Experience with Fusion pipelines, query workflows, collections, and connectors.
Search relevance tuning and analytics experience.
Production support and release management experience.
AWS Cloud (EC2, ECS/Fargate, S3, Lambda, DocumentDB).
DevOps and CI/CD implementation.
Strong client-facing communication and stakeholder management skills.
Preferred
Generative AI and Agentic AI exposure.
Semantic Search and Vector Search implementations.
Java, Python, REST APIs.
Microservices architecture.
E-commerce search domain experience.
Job Description/Responsibilities:
1. Client & Business Stakeholder Engagement
Act as the primary onsite contact for all Lucidworks Fusion Search-related initiatives.
Gather and analyze business requirements from product owners and business stakeholders.
Translate business needs into technical solutions and implementation roadmaps.
Conduct requirement clarification sessions, design discussions, and solution walkthroughs.
Present search platform capabilities, enhancements, and release updates to stakeholders.
Drive prioritization of search enhancements and defect remediation activities.
2. Solution Architecture & Technical Leadership
Define end-to-end enterprise search architecture leveraging Lucidworks Fusion, Solr, AWS, and associated technologies.
Provide technical direction to offshore development and support teams.
Review solution designs, indexing strategies, search relevance tuning, and data integration approaches.
Establish best practices for Fusion configurations, pipelines, query profiles, collections, and data sources.
Lead root cause analysis for critical platform issues and performance bottlenecks.
3. Release & Deployment Management
Own monthly and quarterly release planning activities.
Review release scope, deployment plans, and implementation schedules.
Coordinate with Lucidworks support teams during major production deployments.
Govern release readiness reviews, risk assessments, and rollback planning.
Ensure successful deployment across Authoring, Production, and Backup environments.
4. Production Support Governance
Oversee production health monitoring and operational excellence.
Monitor ingestion pipelines, indexing jobs, query performance, and system stability.
Review daily delta ingestion reports and ensure data quality compliance.
Manage incident response, severity handling, and stakeholder communications.
Drive continuous improvement initiatives to minimize production issues.
5. Search Relevance & Optimization
Lead search relevance tuning and optimization initiatives.
Improve search ranking strategies, synonyms, boosts, facets, and query pipelines.
Analyze user search behavior and recommend platform improvements.
Drive search analytics and KPI-based optimization across business applications.
6. Environment & Quality Management
Govern QA environment setup and refresh activities.
Validate release readiness through functional, integration, and end-to-end testing.
Ensure Fusion configurations are properly migrated across environments.
Coordinate testing cycles with business users and QA teams.
7. Offshore Team Coordination
Provide day-to-day guidance to offshore developers, DevOps engineers, and support teams.
Review work estimates, sprint plans, and delivery commitments.
Ensure adherence to coding standards, release processes, and support procedures.
Facilitate daily standups, defect triages, and technical review sessions.
8. AWS & Microservices Oversight
Oversee AWS-hosted search-related services and integrations.
Coordinate support for microservices running on AWS Fargate, EC2, and DocumentDB environments.
Ensure application scalability, reliability, and performance compliance.
Drive CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and cloud optimization initiatives.
9. Vendor & Lucidworks Coordination
Coordinate with Lucidworks technical support teams for product issues and enhancements.
Track support tickets and escalation management.
Participate in platform upgrade planning and roadmap discussions.
Ensure adherence to vendor-recommended best practices.
10. Innovation & AI/Search Modernization
Drive adoption of AI-powered search capabilities and intelligent search enhancements.
Evaluate opportunities for vector search, semantic search, GenAI integrations, and agentic search experiences.
Support enterprise AI initiatives across the search portfolio.
Identify opportunities for automation, operational efficiency, and improved user experience.
Expected Deliverables
Search roadmap and architecture governance.
Monthly release management and production deployment oversight.
Search relevance improvement initiatives.
Incident management and RCA documentation.
Performance optimization recommendations.
Technical leadership for offshore teams.
Business stakeholder reporting and executive updates.
AI-powered search modernization strategy.
Years of Experience: 13.00 Years of Experience
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