Lead Software Engineer, Search (Semantic Platform)

About this role

Welcome to the Agentic Commerce Era
At Commerce, our mission is to empower businesses to innovate, grow, and thrive with our open, AI-driven commerce ecosystem. As the parent company of BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift, we connect the tools and systems that power growth, enabling businesses to unlock the full potential of their data, deliver seamless and personalized experiences across every channel, and adapt swiftly to an ever-changing market. We believe in harnessing AI responsibly to unlock new possibilities, and we’re looking for individuals who use it intentionally to solve problems, accelerate outcomes, and expand what’s possible in their role. Our purpose is to help businesses confidently solve complex commerce challenges so they can build smarter, adapt faster, and grow on their own terms. If you want to be part of a team of bold builders, sharp thinkers, and technical trailblazers who shape the future of commerce, this is the place for you.
We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer, Search to pioneer the next evolution of our search infrastructure. In this role, you won't just be maintaining query pipelines; you will be responsible for building, iterating, and scaling semantic search via hybrid search on OpenSearch as a core, foundational platform capability.

As the technical lead for this initiative, you will architect the systems that blend traditional keyword matching with deep semantic understanding. You will own the strategy for integrating vector embeddings, neural search, and dense/sparse hybrid retrieval, directly impacting how users discover data across our entire ecosystem. If you are a hands-on technical leader who loves OpenSearch, relevancy tuning, and building high-throughput, foundational capabilities, we want you.

BigCommerce, part of the Commerce brand family, helps merchants increase sales at every stage of their growth. From small startups to mid-market businesses and large enterprises, we provide the leading e-commerce platform. Our customers can then concentrate on what's most important: growing their businesses. We enable our customers to build, innovate, and grow, collectively reshaping the e-commerce industry.

What You’ll Do

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Architect the Future of Search: Lead the design and implementation of semantic search capabilities, utilizing OpenSearch to build a robust, hybrid search (BM25 + vector) capability from the ground up

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Iterate & Optimize: Continuously evaluate, benchmark, and fine-tune search relevance, ranking models, and k-NN/neural search configurations within OpenSearch

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Own the Indexing Pipeline: Maintain, scale, and evolve our core data ingestion and indexing pipelines (built on MySQL, Kafka/RabbitMQ, and backend microservices) to seamlessly support dense vector ingestion and de-duplicated, resilient synchronization

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Technical Leadership: Guide the technical roadmap for the Search team, establish engineering best practices, and mentor senior and mid-level engineers through complex architectural decisions

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Production Excellence: Ensure the search platform meets ultra-low latency requirements and high-availability SLAs under massive, concurrent traffic loads while participating in the team's on-call rotation

Who Are You

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Experience: 7+ years of professional software development experience, with a proven track record in a technical leadership or staff-level capacity

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OpenSearch/Elasticsearch Expertise: Deep hands-on experience building, scaling, and fine-tuning OpenSearch (or Elasticsearch) clusters at scale

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Semantic & Hybrid Search: Proven experience implementing semantic search, working with text embeddings, vector databases, and configuring hybrid search scoring models

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Strong Backend Fundamentals: High proficiency in a strongly typed language like GoLang, Scala, or Java, alongside experience with languages like PHP

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Data Pipelines: Strong experience with relational databases (MySQL), schema design, and distributed messaging tools (Kafka or RabbitMQ) for heavy data mutation and indexing

• Familiarity with the OpenSearch Neural Search plugin, k-NN search, or Learning to Rank (LTR)

• Experience migrating large-scale search infrastructure from traditional Elasticsearch configurations to advanced OpenSearch semantic implementations

• Experience setting up automated search quality measurement frameworks (e.g., NDCG, MRR)

• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) in a cloud environment

(Pay Transparency Range: $182,000.00 – $259,000.00)
Work Where You Thrive
Commerce is a remote-first company. For team members in Austin, Atlanta, and London, we offer optional collaborative workspaces for team gatherings, workshops, and in-person connection. Use them whenever they’re helpful, balancing focused individual work with meaningful in-person collaboration.

Compensation Transparency
The national base salary range for this role is posted above in this job post.

Final compensation will be determined based on factors such as relevant experience, skills, qualifications and geographic location. We also consider internal equity to help ensure fair and consistent pay practices across our teams.

Where applicable, this role may also be eligible for variable compensation (such as bonus or commission), equity, and benefits in accordance with local policies. Details will be shared during the hiring process. We are committed to equitable and transparent pay practices that align to market data, internal equity, and individual contribution.

Inclusion and Belonging
At Commerce, we believe that celebrating the unique histories, perspectives and abilities of every employee makes a difference for our company, our customers and our community. We are an equal opportunity employer and the inclusive atmosphere we build together will make room for every person to contribute, grow and thrive.
We are committed to creating an inclusive and accessible hiring experience for all candidates. If you require…