Search & Conversational AI Tech Lead

Our Client, a Business Manufacturing and Supply company, is looking for a Search & Conversational AI Tech Lead for their Charlotte, NC location. Responsibilities: • Lead the design, build, tuning and operation of the search layer of the client's website. The role delivers secure, grounded, and supportable conversational search using Lucidworks Fusion. • Translate customer and business needs into scalable index and query pipelines across web, content, commerce, and AI platforms. • Search Platform and Retrieval Engineering • Design and implement collections, schemas, connectors, index/query pipelines, query profiles, and REST API integrations in Lucidworks Fusion or an equivalent platform. • Build and tune lexical, semantic, vector, and neural hybrid retrieval, including embeddings, blend weights, thresholds, boosting, filters, facets, synonyms, and fallback behavior. • Use signals and behavioral data to improve relevance, recommendations, personalization, and popular or successful results. • Create relevance benchmarks, automated regression tests, citation and grounding tests, latency targets, and per-query cost measures. • Troubleshoot ingestion, indexing, Solr, Kubernetes/AWS, APIs, pipelines, model endpoints, and front-end integrations. • Conversational Search and Generative Ai • Engineer single-turn and multi-turn search flows with intent recognition, entity extraction, query rewriting, clarification, and session context. • Implement grounded RAG that retrieves approved sources, cites evidence, and suppresses or falls back when evidence or confidence is insufficient. • Integrate with enterprise LLM services and Client AI Gateway using prompt controls, model configuration, rate limits, error handling, latency budgets, and cost governance. • Tune experiences for product numbers, specifications, availability, certificates, manuals, application notes, and related support content. • Apply guardrails for transactional or product-SKU queries, low-confidence grounding, and zero-result scenarios. • Integration, Delivery, and Operations • Partner with AEM and front-end engineers to deliver accessible search results, conversational answers, follow-up suggestions, and facets aligned with the Client Design System. • Manage Fusion configuration as code through GitLab, peer review, automated testing, and CI/CD practices. • Instrument click-through, zero-result, no-click, reformulation, abandonment, task completion, latency, and pipeline-health metrics. • Produce architecture diagrams, deployment documentation, runbooks, configuration standards, and knowledge-transfer materials. • Work with security, privacy, legal, architecture, product, content, and business teams on access controls, data handling, AI guardrails, and release readiness. • Participate in Client AI-DLC and Agile delivery cadence. Requirements: • 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. Why Should You Apply? • Health Benefits • Referral Program • Excellent growth and advancement opportunities