Software Engineering Lead (Elasticsearch)

TL;DR

Software Engineering Lead (Elasticsearch): Leading the Search Experience team to design and deliver scalable search and retrieval systems with an accent on semantic and vector search. Focus on building high-performance AI-powered retrieval infrastructure, managing knowledge graphs, and optimizing search relevance using Lucene and Elasticsearch.

Location: Pennsylvania, USA

Salary: $115,400 - $192,300

Company

hirify.global is a global leader in advanced information and decision support for science and healthcare.

What you will do

• Provide technical leadership for the Search Experience team, guiding the design and implementation of shared retrieval systems.
• Own the technical delivery of search platform initiatives, ensuring scalability, relevance, and reliability.
• Expand content search capabilities through the application of vector and lexical search techniques.
• Design and develop scalable search services and microservices using Elasticsearch, Spark, and Airflow.
• Lead design discussions, conduct code reviews, and mentor engineers through technical coaching.
• Collaborate with product and research stakeholders to integrate search platforms with AI ecosystems.

Requirements

• Current expertise with Lucene, Elasticsearch, Solr or similar search engines is mandatory.
• Demonstrated experience as a technical lead for complex backend or search platform systems.
• Extensive development skills in Python and/or Java.
• Experience building AI/LLM-powered or GenAI applications, including vector/embedding-based search and KNN algorithms.
• Strong backend fundamentals in API design, data modelling, distributed systems, and performance tuning.
• Must be authorized to work in the US.

Nice to have

• Experience with Scala.
• Exposure to graph-based data models or knowledge graph architecture.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive base pay with geographic differentials.
• Eligibility for an annual incentive bonus.
• Country-specific health and well-being benefits.
• Commitment to a fair and accessible hiring process and equal opportunity employment.