Job-ID29435058Reference26-27611 Type ContractSalaryUp to $80 / hour Remote 100% Remote Candidates must be located in or able to work within the East Coast time zone. REMOTE OPPORTUNITYOverviewClient is seeking a Search Engineer / Technical Lead to lead the design, implementation, optimization, and operation of the enterprise search layer supporting digital customer experiences. This role will deliver secure, grounded, and supportable conversational search capabilities using Lucidworks Fusion, with a strong preference for candidates who have hands-on Fusion expertise. The position combines technical leadership with hands-on engineering, focusing on search relevance, retrieval optimization, conversational AI, and enterprise search integrations across web, content, commerce, and AI platforms. The initial focus will be on single-turn answer experiences, expanding into multi-turn conversational search capabilities.
Core Responsibilities:
Design and implement collections, schemas, connectors, indexing and query pipelines, query profiles, and REST API integrations within Lucidworks Fusion or a comparable enterprise search platform. Build and optimize lexical, semantic, vector, and hybrid retrieval solutions, including embeddings, relevance tuning, boosting, filtering, synonyms, facets, and fallback strategies. Leverage behavioral signals and analytics to improve relevance, recommendations, personalization, and search effectiveness. Develop relevance benchmarks, regression testing frameworks, grounding and citation validation, latency objectives, and search quality measurements. Troubleshoot ingestion pipelines, indexing processes, Solr environments, Kubernetes and AWS deployments, APIs, model endpoints, and front-end integrations. Engineer conversational search experiences with intent detection, entity extraction, query rewriting, clarification workflows, and session context management. Implement grounded RAG architectures that retrieve approved content, provide citations, and apply confidence-based fallback behavior. Integrate enterprise LLM services and AI gateway technologies while managing prompt controls, model configuration, rate limiting, error handling, latency targets, and cost governance. Partner with AEM and front-end teams to deliver accessible search experiences, conversational answers, facets, and follow-up recommendations. Produce architecture documentation, deployment guides, runbooks, operational standards, and knowledge-transfer materials while collaborating with security, legal, privacy, architecture, product, and business stakeholders.
Essential Qualifications, Skills, and Technologies:- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Data Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.5+ years of experience in search engineering, information retrieval, or enterprise application development.
- Strong hands-on experience with Lucidworks Fusion. Comparable experience with platforms such as Solr/Lucene, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Algolia, Vespa, or Azure AI Search will be considered, though Lucidworks Fusion experience is strongly preferred.
- Experience with schemas, analyzers, tokenization, synonyms, faceting, boosting, filtering, relevance scoring, query debugging, connectors, signals, custom pipeline stages, and REST APIs.
- Practical expertise in semantic search, embeddings, approximate nearest-neighbor retrieval, neural hybrid ranking, relevance evaluation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), grounding strategies, prompt design, citations, guardrails, and fallback patterns.
- Experience designing multi-turn conversational experiences, including session management, intent classification, and entity extraction.
- Experience deploying and supporting search workloads in AWS and Kubernetes environments, including observability and production troubleshooting.
- Proficiency with Java and/or Python, JSON, HTTP APIs, Git, automated testing, and CI/CD practices.
- Ability to translate business requirements and customer journeys into technical designs, acceptance criteria, measurable outcomes, and delivery plans.
- Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders and the ability to work independently in ambiguous environments.
- Preferred Skills or Experience
- Lucidworks Fusion 5.x implementation, administration, upgrade, or self-hosted deployment experience.
- Experience with Fusion AI, RAY, Learning-to-Rank, Relevance Workbench, Analytics Studio, Commerce Studio, A/B testing, or similar search optimization capabilities.
- Integration experience with AEM as a Cloud Service, commerce platforms, product catalogs, digital assets, or document and certificate services.
- Knowledge of Redis or similar session-store technologies.
- Experience with multilingual search, part-number and SKU search optimization, permissions-aware retrieval, and blending structured and unstructured content.
- Experience operating within compliance-sensitive or document-intensive environments.
- Familiarity with accessibility, privacy, secure AI development, responsible AI practices, and production monitoring.
- Relevant search, cloud, or AI certifications.
Work Details:
Remote opportunity.
Limited travel as needed.
Nesco Resource offers a comprehensive benefits package for our associates, which includes a MEC (Minimum Essential Coverage) plan that encompasses Medical, Vision, Dental, 401K, and EAP (Employee Assistance Program) services.
Nesco Resource provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.
