Enterprise Search Tech Lead
About the role
The Enterprise Search Tech Lead (Software Engineer) position at 3M provides an opportunity to transition from other private, public, government, or military experience to a 3M career. This role leads the design, development, and optimization of 3M’s enterprise search platform, focusing on 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.
- Drive platform evolution toward hybrid retrieval (lexical + semantic/vector search) to support RAG, LLM grounding, and agentic AI use cases.
- Create and maintain comprehensive technical documentation including C4 architecture models, system design diagrams, and operational runbooks.
- Mentor and lead developers on the search engineering team, conducting code reviews, and raising engineering standards.
- Partner with the domain architect on long-term strategy while independently executing complex platform changes.
- Build and maintain Airflow-orchestrated ingestion workflows, monitoring/alerting systems, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Support cross-functional teams by troubleshooting search issues, monitoring system health, and partnering with consuming applications (product navigator, digital commerce, AI assistants).
- Be on-call in the event of critical issues requiring timely resolution.
Requirements
- 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.
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.
Benefits
Pay and benefits range from $145,676 - $178,049, including base pay plus variable incentive pay, if eligible. Additional benefits include medical, dental, vision, health savings accounts, flexible spending accounts, disability benefits, life insurance, voluntary benefits, paid absences, and retirement benefits. Details are available at this link.
Pay & Benefits Overview
For more details on pay and benefits, please refer to the Pay & Benefits Overview page.
Company Information
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