{"id":1289093,"url":"https://alion.io/job/makeswift-lead-software-engineer-search-semantic-platform","title":"Lead Software Engineer, Search (Semantic Platform)","company":{"id":1768664,"name":"Makeswift","domain":"makeswift.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/makeswift","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Austin, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":182000,"max":259000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":259000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Hybrid Search","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"MySQL","optional":false},{"name":"OpenSearch","optional":false},{"name":"PHP","optional":false},{"name":"RabbitMQ","optional":false},{"name":"Scala","optional":false},{"name":"Semantic Search","optional":false},{"name":"Semantic Search","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-16T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-16","last_verified_at":"2026-10-07T22:13:08Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":22,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":22},"description":"Welcome to the Agentic Commerce Era\nAt Commerce, our mission is to empower businesses to innovate, grow, and thrive with our open, AI-driven commerce ecosystem. As the parent company of BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift, we connect the tools and systems that power growth, enabling businesses to unlock the full potential of their data, deliver seamless and personalized experiences across every channel, and adapt swiftly to an ever-changing market. We believe in harnessing AI responsibly to unlock new possibilities, and we’re looking for individuals who use it intentionally to solve problems, accelerate outcomes, and expand what’s possible in their role. Our purpose is to help businesses confidently solve complex commerce challenges so they can build smarter, adapt faster, and grow on their own terms. If you want to be part of a team of bold builders, sharp thinkers, and technical trailblazers who shape the future of commerce, this is the place for you.\nWe are looking for a Lead Software Engineer, Search to pioneer the next evolution of our search infrastructure. In this role, you won't just be maintaining query pipelines; you will be responsible for building, iterating, and scaling semantic search via hybrid search on OpenSearch as a core, foundational platform capability.\nAs the technical lead for this initiative, you will architect the systems that blend traditional keyword matching with deep semantic understanding. You will own the strategy for integrating vector embeddings, neural search, and dense/sparse hybrid retrieval, directly impacting how users discover data across our entire ecosystem. If you are a hands-on technical leader who loves OpenSearch, relevancy tuning, and building high-throughput, foundational capabilities, we want you in our Austin hub.\nBigCommerce, part of the Commerce brand family, helps merchants increase sales at every stage of their growth. From small startups to mid-market businesses and large enterprises, we provide the leading e-commerce platform. Our customers can then concentrate on what's most important: growing their businesses. We enable our customers to build, innovate, and grow, collectively reshaping the e-commerce industry.\nWhat You’ll Do\nArchitect the Future of Search: Lead the design and implementation of semantic search capabilities, utilizing OpenSearch to build a robust, hybrid search (BM25 + vector) capability from the ground up\n\nIterate & Optimize: Continuously evaluate, benchmark, and fine-tune search relevance, ranking models, and k-NN/neural search configurations within OpenSearch\n\nOwn the Indexing Pipeline: Maintain, scale, and evolve our core data ingestion and indexing pipelines (built on MySQL, Kafka/RabbitMQ, and backend microservices) to seamlessly support dense vector ingestion and de-duplicated, resilient synchronization\n\nTechnical Leadership: Guide the technical roadmap for the Search team, establish engineering best practices, and mentor senior and mid-level engineers through complex architectural decisions\n\nProduction Excellence: Ensure the search platform meets ultra-low latency requirements and high-availability SLAs under massive, concurrent traffic loads while participating in the team's on-call rotation\n\nWho Are You\nExperience: 7+ years of professional software development experience, with a proven track record in a technical leadership or staff-level capacity\n\nOpenSearch/Elasticsearch Expertise: Deep hands-on experience building, scaling, and fine-tuning OpenSearch (or Elasticsearch) clusters at scale\n\nSemantic & Hybrid Search: Proven experience implementing semantic search, working with text embeddings, vector databases, and configuring hybrid search scoring models\n\nStrong Backend Fundamentals: High proficiency in a strongly typed language like GoLang, Scala, or Java, alongside experience with languages like PHP\n\nData Pipelines: Strong experience with relational databases (MySQL), schema design, and distributed messaging tools (Kafka or RabbitMQ) for heavy data mutation and indexing\n\nFamiliarity with the OpenSearch Neural Search plugin, k-NN search, or Learning to Rank (LTR)\n\nExperience migrating large-scale search infrastructure from traditional Elasticsearch configurations to advanced OpenSearch semantic implementations\n\nExperience setting up automated search quality measurement frameworks (e.g., NDCG, MRR)\n\nFamiliarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) in a cloud environment\n\nLocation: Preference is for candidates based in the Austin,TX area or willing to relocate.\n\nWork Where You Thrive\nFor candidates based in the Austin metro area the position follows a hybrid work model with three days per week in the office, balancing focused individual work with meaningful in-person collaboration.\n(Pay Transparency Range: $182,000.00- $259,000.00)\nCompensation Transparency\nThe national base salary range for this role is posted above in this job post.\nFinal compensation will be determined based on factors such as relevant experience, skills, qualifications and geographic location. We also consider internal equity to help ensure fair and consistent pay practices across our teams.\nWhere applicable, this role may also be eligible for variable compensation (such as bonus or commission), equity, and benefits in accordance with local policies. Details will be shared during the hiring process. We are committed to equitable and transparent pay practices that align to market data, internal equity, and individual contribution.\nInclusion and Belonging\nAt Commerce, we believe that celebrating the unique histories, perspectives and abilities of every employee makes a difference for our company, our customers and our community. We are an equal opportunity employer and the inclusive atmosphere we build together will make room for every person to contribute, grow and thrive.\nWe are committed to creating an inclusive and accessible hiring experience for all candidates. If you require accommodations or adjustments at any stage of the recruitment process, please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.\nLearn more about the Commerce team, culture and benefits at https://www.commerce.com/careers/\nIdentity Verification\nTo protect our candidates and company from fraudulent activity, our interview process includes a government ID and biometric verification via Persona, our trusted identity verification provider. All information is collected and processed securely in accordance with applicable privacy laws.\nProtect Yourself Against Hiring Scams: Our Corporate Disclaimer\nCommerce, along with many other employers, has become the subject of fraudulent job offers to hopeful prospective job seekers.\nBe advised:\nCommerce does not offer jobs to individuals who do not go through our formal hiring process.\nCommerce will never:\nrequire payment of recruitment fees from candidates;\nrequest personally identifiable information through unsanctioned websites or applications;\nattempt to solicit money from you as part of the hiring process or as part of an employment offer;\nsolicit money to complete visa requirements as part of a job offer.\nIf you receive unsolicited offers of employment from Commerce, we urge you to be extremely cautious and avoid engaging or responding.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7274,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Hybrid work"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Commerce","Design & Creative","Branding"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-26T07:20:43Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":72,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.8,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":21,"expected_fill_days":31,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:mid"],"computed_at":"2026-10-07T05:47:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":259000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/makeswift-lead-software-engineer-search-semantic-platform","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/makeswift-lead-software-engineer-search-semantic-platform.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-08T00:23:58Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":476,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":4524,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-09T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":1768664},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=1768664"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fmakeswift-lead-software-engineer-search-semantic-platform"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fmakeswift-lead-software-engineer-search-semantic-platform"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fmakeswift-lead-software-engineer-search-semantic-platform"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/makeswift-lead-software-engineer-search-semantic-platform\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmakeswift-lead-software-engineer-search-semantic-platform"}]}