Enterprise Search Architect (Lucidworks Fusion & Apache Solr)

Our client, a IT Services and Consulting company, is looking for a Enterprise Search Architect (Lucidworks Fusion & Apache Solr for their Chicago, IL location.

Responsibilities:

Client & Business Stakeholder Engagement

• 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.

Solution Architecture & Technical Leadership:

• 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.

Release & Deployment Management:

• 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.

Production Support Governance:

• 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.

Search Relevance & Optimization:

• 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.

Environment & Quality Management:

• 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.

Offshore Team Coordination:

• 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.

AWS & Microservices Oversight:

• 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.

Vendor & Lucidworks Coordination:

• 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.

Innovation & AI/Search Modernization:

• 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.

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.

Requirements:

• 10+ years of enterprise search, search platform architecture, or search engineering experience
• 6+ years of hands-on Lucidworks Fusion implementation and administration
• Experience leading enterprise search architecture, production support, and platform modernization initiatives
• 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.
• Generative AI and Agentic AI exposure.
• Semantic Search and Vector Search implementations.
• Java, Python, REST APIs.
• Microservices architecture.
• E-commerce search domain experience.
• Years of Experience: 13.00 Years of Experience

Tops Skills:

• Lucidworks Fusion
• Apache Solr
• Fusion pipelines, query workflows, collections, and connectors

Skills:

• Category Name Required Importance Experience
• Cognitive Search Lucidworks Fusion Yes 1 6 + Years
• DXDE_NEW LWF - Fusion App Studio Yes 1 6 + Years
• DXDE_NEW LWF - Index Pipeline Yes 1 6 + Years
• DXDE_NEW LWF - Query Pipeline Yes 1 6 + Years
• DXDE_NEW LWF - Rules editor Yes 1 6 + Years
• IDE DevOps AWS Cloud Yes 1 6 + Years
• Java Apache Solr Yes 1 6 + Years

Why Should You Apply?

• Health Benefits
• Referral Program
• Excellent growth and advancement opportunities