Senior Java Architect

(Key skills: Java, Microservices, Elasticsearch / Solr)

Job Description:

Essential Function and Responsibilities:

• Design and architect search & recommendations platform, work on Next Generation architecture in addition to supporting and maintaining current platforms including legacy systems
• Focus on improving search relevance, ranking and recommendations, personalization architecture
• Microservices development to support the many services within search and science teams.
• Provide technical leadership within the team and build partnerships with cross-discipline team members
• Write code and develop search & recommendation services, data ingestion indexing pipelines
• Work with stakeholders throughout the organization to identify opportunities for leveraging company data to drive search, discovery, and recommendations.
• Work closely with other architects, engineers, data analysts, data scientists and project managers in assessing project requirements, design, develop and support data ingestions, API services and Elasticsearch stack solution
• Work with Data Scientists in integrating ML Ranking models, NLP and applying query understanding techniques in search
• Proven work on large-scale search, discovery, typeahead (auto-suggest), personalization, and recommendation implementation and its related infrastructure
• Able to influence on priorities working with various partners including engineers, project management office and leadership
• Mentor junior team members, define architecture, code review, hands-on development and deliver the work in sprint cycle
• Participate in design discussions and other team members for the design of new systems and re-engineering of components of existing systems
• Wear Architect hat when required to bring new ideas to the table based on past experience, thought leadership and forward thinking
• Take holistic approach to building solutions by thinking big picture and overall solution
• Perform a/b tests, work with Data Analysts and Data Scientists in evaluating the impact of search / recommendation improvements
• Work on moving away from legacy systems into next generation architecture
• Take complete ownership from requirements, solution design, development, production launch and post launch production support. Participate in regular on-call rotations.

Education and Experience:

• BS or MS in Computer Science (or related field) with 12-15 years of hands-on software development (preferably in Java), architecture and technical mentorship experience
• 10+ years of experience in search technologies such as Elasticsearch / Solr / Lucene. Ideal candidate should have knowledge and experience in search relevancy advance techniques & query understanding.
• 10+ years of experience in building microservices / Rest APIs and data ingestion workers
• 10+ years of experience in using databases such as SQL Server, Dynamo, Redis and other NoSQL DBs
• Nice to have experience in doing Vector Search using embeddings generated by ML models, Generative AI and conversational search
• Experience in building large scale multi-region, fault-tolerant and resilient system
• Software engineering skills in system architecture & design, coding, OOP, test driven development
• Experience with multi-node clustering, ETL, monitoring of systems and APIs.
• Knowledge of hot/warm/cold data, ILM (Index LifeCycle policies), Data streams, Transforms, CCR and other infrastructure aspect of services and Elasticsearch
• Strong experience in building microservices, REST principles and design patterns
• In-depth knowledge of Java, Docker, RESTful web services, Spring, Distributed caching techniques, Kubernetes, Observability techniques, Kafka, Release processes, versioning, Akamai, B&D, CI/CD pipelines, caching strategies
• Phenomenal communication and influencing skills