Role OverviewWe are seeking a Senior Search Engineer – E‑Commerce (Solr Cloud) for a permanent position to own and continuously elevate the enterprise search experience on our large-scale eCommerce platform. This hands-on IT role focuses on search relevance optimization, performance at scale, advanced parametric search, and Solr Cloud excellence to support retailer-grade catalogs and high-traffic customer journeys.
You will work closely with front-end engineers, back-end developers, and business stakeholders to translate customer behavior into measurable search improvements—ensuring search is not just a system, but a product capability that drives discoverability, conversion, and customer satisfaction.
Key ResponsibilitiesSearch Relevance & Customer-Focused Result Accuracy- Improve keyword-to-product matching so customers quickly find relevant products using real-world search terms.
- Tune Solr relevance using ranking and boosting strategies, query weighting and scoring models, and analyzer configuration (synonyms, stemming, stop words, language analyzers).
- Optimize search behavior for partial keywords, short queries, misspellings, search variations, and product codes vs. descriptive terms.
- Partner with front-end teams to ensure search UI, ranking logic, and user expectations align.
Large-Scale eCommerce & SKU Volume Management- Architect and optimize Solr collections to support retailer-grade catalogs (hundreds of thousands to millions of SKUs).
- Ensure search performance and stability under high catalog complexity, high query concurrency, and seasonal/promotional traffic spikes.
- Optimize sharding, replication, and caching strategies for both relevance and low latency.
- Apply retail-specific search best practices (category-aware relevance, attribute prioritization, product discoverability).
Parametric & Faceted Search Optimization- Design and optimize advanced faceted search across product attributes (dimensions, categories, ranges, technical specs).
- Ensure faceted navigation remains fast and accurate at scale, supports complex filtering use cases, and works seamlessly with relevance ranking.
- Collaborate with business and merchandising stakeholders to ensure attributes and filters reflect customer expectations.
Indexing Strategy (Full & Incremental)- Own and improve the indexing architecture supporting high-volume catalogs and frequent data updates.
- Optimize full reindex execution time and stability, incremental (partial) indexing for near-real-time updates and minimize impact on live query performance.
- Work closely with back-end developers and data teams to validate data quality, schema evolution, and zero-downtime index changes.
Search Analytics & Continuous Improvement- Analyze Solr logs and analytics to identify "no result" queries, low-quality matches, relevance gaps, and opportunities for synonym expansion or schema enhancements.
- Establish a continuous improvement cycle driven by real customer search behavior.
- Translate analytical findings into concrete configuration, data, or UI improvements.
Solr Cloud Platform Excellence- Leverage Solr Cloud features such as distributed indexing, shard management, and replication to ensure resilience and scalability.
- Define and maintain operational best practices: monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, performance baselines, tuning playbooks, incident response, and root cause analysis.
- Act as the Solr/search subject matter expert within the IT organization.
Required Qualifications- 5+ years of hands-on experience in search engineering or relevance optimization.
- Proven experience supporting large-scale retailers or enterprise eCommerce sites with high SKU counts and customer traffic.
- Strong hands-on experience with Apache Solr / Solr Cloud in product