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Search & Conversational AI Tech Lead

ICONMACharlotte, NC🇺🇸United StatesPosted Oct 8, 2026

Quick Overview

Seniority
Mid Senior
Work mode
Hybrid
Location
Charlotte, NC, United States
Posted
22 hours ago
AWSA/B TestingAgileAzureComplianceGenerative AIGitHTTPJavaKubernetesLLMPythonRESTRedis

Job Description

Our Client, a Business Manufacturing and Supply company, is looking for a Search & Conversational AI Tech Lead for their Charlotte, NC location.
Responsibilities:
  • Lead the design, build, tuning and operation of the search layer of the client's website. The role delivers secure, grounded, and supportable conversational search using Lucidworks Fusion.
  • Translate customer and business needs into scalable index and query pipelines across web, content, commerce, and AI platforms.
  • Search Platform and Retrieval Engineering
    • 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.
  • Conversational Search and Generative Ai
    • 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 Client 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. 
  • Integration, Delivery, and Operations
    • Partner with AEM and front-end engineers to deliver accessible search results, conversational answers, follow-up suggestions, and facets aligned with the Client 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 Client AI-DLC and Agile delivery cadence.
 
Requirements:
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Data Science, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
  • 5+ years 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 nontechnical stakeholders; able to work independently, prioritize competing work, resolve ambiguity, and transfer knowledge

Preferred 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, or equivalent capabilities.
  • Integration experience with AEM as a Cloud Service, commerce, product catalogs, digital assets, or certificate/document services.
  • Knowledge of Redis or another session store; multilingual search; part-number/SKU handling; permissions-aware retrieval; and structured/unstructured content blending.
  • Experience in compliance-sensitive or document-intensive environments, plus familiarity with accessibility, privacy, secure AI development, responsible AI, and production monitoring.
  • Relevant search, cloud, or AI certifications.
 
Why Should You Apply?
  • Excellent growth and advancement opportunities

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