Search Engineer (Staffing - IT App Developer IV)

About the role

This contract Search Engineer (IT App Dev IV) position is based in Charlotte, NC, with the option to work remotely within a commutable distance for occasional meetings. It is a 6‑month assignment, with possible extension based on budget and performance. The role serves as an alternative to external professional services, requiring hands‑on technical delivery and solution leadership for a prominent client’s search platform.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, build, tuning, and operation of the search layer.
• Deliver secure, grounded, and supportable conversational search using Lucidworks Fusion or a comparable enterprise search platform, starting with a single‑turn answer experience and evolving to multi‑turn conversational search.
• Translate customer and business needs into scalable index and query pipelines across web, content, commerce, and AI platforms.
• Design and implement collections, schemas, connectors, index/query pipelines, query profiles, and REST API integrations in Lucidworks Fusion or an equivalent platform.
• Build and tune lexical, semantic, vector, and neural hybrid retrieval, including embeddings, blend weights, thresholds, boosting, filters, facets, synonyms, and fallback behavior.
• Use signals and behavioral data to improve relevance, recommendations, personalization, and popular or successful results.
• Create relevance benchmarks, automated regression tests, citation and grounding tests, latency targets, and per‑query cost measures.
• Troubleshoot ingestion, indexing, Solr, Kubernetes/AWS, APIs, pipelines, model endpoints, and front‑end integrations.
• Engineer single‑turn and multi‑turn search flows with intent recognition, entity extraction, query rewriting, clarification, and session context.
• Implement grounded RAG that retrieves approved sources, cites evidence, and suppresses or falls back when evidence or confidence is insufficient.
• Integrate with enterprise LLM services and Corning's AI Gateway using prompt controls, model configuration, rate limits, error handling, latency budgets, and cost governance.
• Tune experiences for product numbers, specifications, availability, certificates, manuals, application notes, and related support content.
• Apply guardrails for transactional or product‑SKU queries, low‑confidence grounding, and zero‑result scenarios.
• Partner with AEM and front‑end engineers to deliver accessible search results, conversational answers, follow‑up suggestions, and facets aligned with the Corning Design System.
• Manage Fusion configuration as code through GitLab, peer review, automated testing, and CI/CD practices.
• Instrument click‑through, zero‑result, no‑click, reformulation, abandonment, task completion, latency, and pipeline‑health metrics.
• Produce architecture diagrams, deployment documentation, runbooks, configuration standards, and knowledge‑transfer materials.
• Work with security, privacy, legal, architecture, product, content, and business teams on access controls, data handling, AI guardrails, and release readiness.
• Participate in Corning's AI‑DLC and Agile delivery cadence.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in search engineering, information retrieval, or enterprise application development, with substantial experience in Lucidworks Fusion or comparable platforms such as Solr/Lucene, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Algolia, Vespa, or Azure AI Search.
• Hands‑on knowledge of schemas, analyzers, tokenization, synonyms, faceting, boosting, filtering, relevance scoring, query debugging, connectors, signals, custom pipeline stages, and REST APIs.
• Practical experience with semantic search, embeddings, approximate nearest‑neighbor retrieval, neural hybrid ranking, relevance evaluation, RAG, grounding, prompt design, citations, guardrails, and fallback patterns.
• Experience with multi‑turn context, session design, intent classification, and entity extraction.
• Experience deploying or operating search workloads in AWS and Kubernetes, including observability and production troubleshooting.
• Proficiency in Java and/or Python, JSON, HTTP APIs, Git, automated testing, and CI/CD.
• Ability to convert customer journeys and business requirements into technical designs, backlog items, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes.
• Clear communication with technical and non‑technical stakeholders; able to work independently, prioritize competing work, resolve ambiguity, and transfer knowledge.

Qualifications

• Lucidworks Fusion 5.x implementation, upgrade, or administration experience in a self‑hosted environment.
• Experience with Fusion AI, RAY, Learning‑to‑Rank, Relevance Workbench, Analytics Studio, Commerce Studio, A/B testing,