Enterprise Search Tech Lead
The Role
As the Enterprise Search Tech Lead, you will lead the design, development, and optimization of 3M’s enterprise search platform, driving scalable, high-performance search capabilities that support digital experiences and emerging AI applications.
Responsibilities
Lead the design, development, and optimization of enterprise search solutions built on AWS OpenSearch to improve relevance, scalability, and AI-readiness across digital platforms.
Owning technical decisions across the full search stack: ingestion pipelines (Spring Boot/Batch, Kafka), search APIs, index design, and infrastructure-as-code.
Driving platform evolution toward hybrid retrieval (lexical + semantic/vector search) to support RAG, LLM grounding, and agentic AI use cases.
Creating and maintaining comprehensive technical documentation including C4 architecture models, system design diagrams, and operational runbooks.
Mentoring and leading developers on the search engineering team, conducting code reviews, and raising engineering standards.
Partnering with the domain architect on long-term strategy while independently executing complex platform changes.
Building and maintaining Airflow-orchestrated ingestion workflows, monitoring/alerting systems, and CI/CD pipelines.
Supporting cross-functional teams by troubleshooting search issues, monitoring system health, and partnering with consuming applications (product navigator, digital commerce, AI assistants).
Willingness to be on-call in the event of critical issues requiring timely resolution.
Qualifications
Bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, information systems, or Technology field (completed and verified prior to start).
Five (5) years of search-related development experience in a private, public, government, or military environment.
Seven (7) years of overall software engineering experience in a private, public, government or military environment.
Additional Qualifications
Experience with AWS OpenSearch/Elasticsearch: index design, analyzers/tokenizers, synonyms, aggregations, relevance tuning, and performance optimization.
Experience with Java 17+, Spring Boot, Spring Batch, and multi-module Maven projects.
Experience with Kafka/MSK messaging — producers, consumers, and stream processing.
Experience with AWS services (S3, IAM, Lambda, MSK, ECS, CloudWatch, EFS).
Strong understanding of search fundamentals (BM25, relevance tuning, autocomplete, vector search).
Experience with embeddings, vector databases, or RAG pipelines for LLM applications.
Experience building and operating Airflow DAGs for data pipeline orchestration.
Experience modernizing legacy search platforms or migrating between search engine versions.
Familiarity with search analytics, A/B testing for ranking, and relevance measurement (NDCG, MRR).
Demonstrated ability to document complex systems — C4 model, architecture decision records, or equivalent.
Location
Work location: Maplewood, MN or Austin, Texas
Travel
May include up to 10% domestic/international
Relocation
Not Authorized
Compensation
Expected compensation range: $145,676 - $178,049