Search Engineer

This is a hands-on infrastructure and search role where you will be knee-deep in distributed search clusters, scaling Apache Solr and OpenSearch in production. If you enjoy untangling complex performance bottlenecks, handling multi-cloud cluster topologies, and making search queries snappy for end-users, this gig is worth a serious look.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

Expect to spend your days tuning shards, fixing replication lag, and optimizing resource utilization across AWS and secondary cloud providers. You'll be debugging Java and Python codebases that interact directly with your search clusters, writing infrastructure-as-code to spin up new environments, and setting up bulletproof observability so you catch cluster degradation before anyone else notices. It's a mix of deep engineering, operational firefighting, and preventative architecture.

The Core Tech Stack

You absolutely need production battle scars with Apache Solr or OpenSearch—knowing how they fail under high load is non-negotiable. Java and Python are your daily drivers for poking at application code and tooling, while a solid grasp of AWS infrastructure (EC2, VPC, IAM) keeps the lights on. Because they explicitly run multi-cloud setups, familiarity with GCP or another third-party cloud is huge here. Add in Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform, and you have the complete picture of what you'll be managing.

Interview Expectations

Expect the hiring team to grill you on cluster failure modes, such as asking how you would diagnose a Solr or OpenSearch node dropping out of a cluster due to garbage collection pauses or network partitioning. They want to hear about your systematic approach to isolating memory issues and tuning JVM parameters under extreme read/write pressure. Another favorite will likely involve distributed consensus and index management—be ready to explain how you handle shard rebalancing and ILM policies without causing downtime.

Application Advice

Skip the generic templates and make sure your resume explicitly highlights your hands-on production metrics with Solr or OpenSearch. Don't just list the technologies; mention the scale of the clusters you've managed, the query volumes you've handled, and specific performance tuning wins. Sprinkle in your experience with Terraform, Python automation, and AWS tooling so the ATS picks you up immediately as someone who can drop into this architecture on day one and start pushing code.