Lead Software Engineer, Search (Semantic Platform)

About the role

Commerce, the parent company of BigCommerce, Feedonomics and Makeswift, is looking for a Lead Software Engineer, Search to build and scale its semantic search platform. The role leads the design and implementation of hybrid search (keyword plus vector) using OpenSearch, blending traditional keyword matching with deep semantic understanding. It is a remote-first position.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of semantic search capabilities, building a hybrid search (BM25 + vector) capability from the ground up with OpenSearch.
• Evaluate, benchmark and fine-tune search relevance, ranking models and k-NN/neural search configurations within OpenSearch.
• Maintain, scale and evolve the core data ingestion and indexing pipelines (MySQL, Kafka/RabbitMQ, backend microservices) to support dense vector ingestion and resilient synchronization.
• Guide the technical roadmap for the Search team, set engineering best practices and mentor senior and mid-level engineers.
• Ensure the search platform meets ultra-low latency requirements and high-availability SLAs under heavy concurrent traffic, taking part in the on-call rotation.

Required profile

• 7+ years of professional software development experience, with a track record in a technical leadership or staff-level capacity.
• Proven experience implementing semantic search with text embeddings, vector databases and hybrid search scoring models.
• Experience migrating large-scale search infrastructure from traditional Elasticsearch to advanced OpenSearch semantic implementations.
• Experience setting up automated search quality measurement frameworks (e.g. NDCG, MRR).

Required skills

• Deep hands-on experience building, scaling and fine-tuning OpenSearch (or Elasticsearch) clusters at scale.
• High proficiency in a strongly typed language such as Go, Scala or Java, plus experience with PHP.
• Relational databases (MySQL), schema design and distributed messaging tools (Kafka or RabbitMQ).
• Familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes in a cloud environment.

The stated national base salary range is $182,000 - $259,000, depending on experience, skills, qualifications and location. The company is a remote-first employer and may offer variable compensation, equity and benefits.