Senior Search Engineer / Technical Lead

***W2 Contract*** Sr. Search Engineer/Tech. Lead Remote work – Highest preference for candidates from Charlotte, NC, OR Corning, NY OR East Coast 6 months, extendable for long-term Scope of Position: Lead the design, build, tuning, and operation of the search layer for Corning.com. The role delivers secure, grounded, and supportable conversational search using Lucidworks Fusion or a comparable enterprise search platform, with an initial single-turn answer experience followed by multi-turn conversational search. Translate customer and business needs into scalable index and query pipelines across web, content, commerce, and AI platforms. This contract role is an alternative to external professional services and requires hands-on technical delivery as well as solution leadership. Core Competencies: Search engineering | Relevance optimization | Conversational AI | RAG and grounding | Systems integration | Production operations | Analytical problem solving | Cross-functional collaboration | Technical leadership Working Relationships: Collaborates with Enterprise Architecture, Digital Experience product owners, AEM/front-end engineering, commerce and product-data teams, AI platform teams, cloud operations, cybersecurity, privacy/legal, analytics, content owners, and implementation partners. Required Education, Experience, and Skills: 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, 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. Best Regards, Amit