Search Architect (Lucidworks Fusion and Apache Solr)- Only W2

About the role

Act as the primary onsite contact for all Lucidworks Fusion Search-related initiatives. Gather and analyze business requirements from product owners and business stakeholders. Translate business needs into technical solutions and implementation roadmaps. Conduct requirement clarification sessions, design discussions, and solution walkthroughs. Present search platform capabilities, enhancements, and release updates to stakeholders. Drive prioritization of search enhancements and defect remediation activities.

Responsibilities

• Define end-to-end enterprise search architecture leveraging Lucidworks Fusion, Solr, AWS, and associated technologies
• Provide technical direction to offshore development and support teams
• Review solution designs, indexing strategies, search relevance tuning, and data integration approaches
• Establish best practices for Fusion configurations, pipelines, query profiles, collections, and data sources
• Lead root cause analysis for critical platform issues and performance bottlenecks
• Own monthly and quarterly release planning activities
• Review release scope, deployment plans, and implementation schedules
• Coordinate with Lucidworks support teams during major production deployments
• Govern release readiness reviews, risk assessments, and rollback planning
• Ensure successful deployment across Authoring, Production, and Backup environments
• Oversee production health monitoring and operational excellence
• Monitor ingestion pipelines, indexing jobs, query performance, and system stability
• Review daily delta ingestion reports and ensure data quality compliance
• Manage incident response, severity handling, and stakeholder communications
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives to minimize production issues
• Lead search relevance tuning and optimization initiatives
• Improve search ranking strategies, synonyms, boosts, facets, and query pipelines
• Analyze user search behavior and recommend platform improvements
• Drive search analytics and KPI-based optimization across business applications
• Govern QA environment setup and refresh activities
• Validate release readiness through functional, integration, and end-to-end testing
• Ensure Fusion configurations are properly migrated across environments
• Coordinate testing cycles with business users and QA teams
• Provide day-to-day guidance to offshore developers, DevOps engineers, and support teams
• Review work estimates, sprint plans, and delivery commitments
• Ensure adherence to coding standards, release processes, and support procedures
• Facilitate daily standups, defect triages, and technical review sessions
• Oversee AWS-hosted search-related services and integrations
• Coordinate support for microservices running on AWS Fargate, EC2, and DocumentDB environments
• Ensure application scalability, reliability, and performance compliance
• Drive CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and cloud optimization initiatives
• Coordinate with Lucidworks technical support teams for product issues and enhancements
• Track support tickets and escalation management
• Participate in platform upgrade planning and roadmap discussions
• Ensure adherence to vendor-recommended best practices
• Drive adoption of AI-powered search capabilities and intelligent search enhancements
• Evaluate opportunities for vector search, semantic search, GenAI integrations, and agentic search experiences
• Support enterprise AI initiatives across the search portfolio
• Identify opportunities for automation, operational efficiency, and improved user experience

Required Experience

• 12+ years of enterprise search experience
• 6+ years of Lucidworks Fusion implementation and support experience
• Strong expertise in Apache Solr architecture and administration
• Experience with Fusion pipelines, query workflows, collections, and connectors
• Search relevance tuning and analytics experience
• Production support and release management experience
• AWS Cloud (EC2, ECS/Fargate, S3, Lambda, DocumentDB)
• DevOps and CI/CD implementation
• Strong client-facing communication and stakeholder management skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Generative AI and Agentic AI exposure
• Semantic Search and Vector Search implementations
• Java, Python, REST APIs
• Microservices architecture
• E-commerce search domain experience

Expected Deliverables

• Search roadmap and architecture governance
• Monthly release management and production deployment oversight
• Search relevance improvement initiatives
• Incident management and RCA documentation
• Performance optimization recommendations
• Technical leadership for offshore teams
• Business stakeholder reporting and executive updates
• AI-powered search modernization strategy

Location: Chicago, IL. Open to REMOTE with occasional travel.

Employment Type: W2 Position