Senior Search Engineer – E‑Commerce (Solr Cloud)

Role Overview

We are seeking a Senior Search Engineer – E‑Commerce (Solr Cloud) for a permanent position to own and continuously elevate the enterprise search experience on our large-scale eCommerce platform. This hands-on IT role focuses on search relevance optimization, performance at scale, advanced parametric search, and Solr Cloud excellence to support retailer-grade catalogs and high-traffic customer journeys.

You will work closely with front-end engineers, back-end developers, and business stakeholders to translate customer behavior into measurable search improvements—ensuring search is not just a system, but a product capability that drives discoverability, conversion, and customer satisfaction.

Key Responsibilities

Search Relevance & Customer-Focused Result Accuracy

• Improve keyword-to-product matching so customers quickly find relevant products using real-world search terms.
• Tune Solr relevance using ranking and boosting strategies, query weighting and scoring models, and analyzer configuration (synonyms, stemming, stop words, language analyzers).
• Optimize search behavior for partial keywords, short queries, misspellings, search variations, and product codes vs. descriptive terms.
• Partner with front-end teams to ensure search UI, ranking logic, and user expectations align.

Large-Scale eCommerce & SKU Volume Management

• Architect and optimize Solr collections to support retailer-grade catalogs (hundreds of thousands to millions of SKUs).
• Ensure search performance and stability under high catalog complexity, high query concurrency, and seasonal/promotional traffic spikes.
• Optimize sharding, replication, and caching strategies for both relevance and low latency.
• Apply retail-specific search best practices (category-aware relevance, attribute prioritization, product discoverability).

Parametric & Faceted Search Optimization

• Design and optimize advanced faceted search across product attributes (dimensions, categories, ranges, technical specs).
• Ensure faceted navigation remains fast and accurate at scale, supports complex filtering use cases, and works seamlessly with relevance ranking.
• Collaborate with business and merchandising stakeholders to ensure attributes and filters reflect customer expectations.

Indexing Strategy (Full & Incremental)

• Own and improve the indexing architecture supporting high-volume catalogs and frequent data updates.
• Optimize full reindex execution time and stability, incremental (partial) indexing for near-real-time updates and minimize impact on live query performance.
• Work closely with back-end developers and data teams to validate data quality, schema evolution, and zero-downtime index changes.

Search Analytics & Continuous Improvement

• Analyze Solr logs and analytics to identify "no result" queries, low-quality matches, relevance gaps, and opportunities for synonym expansion or schema enhancements.
• Establish a continuous improvement cycle driven by real customer search behavior.
• Translate analytical findings into concrete configuration, data, or UI improvements.

Solr Cloud Platform Excellence

• Leverage Solr Cloud features such as distributed indexing, shard management, and replication to ensure resilience and scalability.
• Define and maintain operational best practices: monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, performance baselines, tuning playbooks, incident response, and root cause analysis.
• Act as the Solr/search subject matter expert within the IT organization.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in search engineering or relevance optimization.
• Proven experience supporting large-scale retailers or enterprise eCommerce sites with high SKU counts and customer traffic.
• Strong hands-on experience with Apache Solr / Solr Cloud in production environments.
• Deep understanding of information retrieval concepts (ranking, scoring, precision/recall).
• Strong experience tuning relevance, analyzers, schemas, and query behavior.
• Experience diagnosing performance and relevance issues using logs and metrics.
• Experience working closely with front-end and back-end engineering teams.
• Comfortable translating business and customer requirements into technical search solutions.
• Strong documentation and communication skills.

Nice to Have

• Experience with enterprise or large retail brands and complex catalogs.
• Exposure to SAP Commerce Cloud or similar enterprise eCommerce platforms.
• Experience with search analytics dashboards and KPIs.
• Understanding of merchandising rules, product taxonomies, and personalization.
• Bilingual English/French.