Sr. Architect - SRARCH

Role: Search Architect Location: Chicago, IL (Onsite) Max Supplier Rate: $105/HR PLEASE ENTER THE CANDIDATE'S CURRENT LOCATION AND RELOCATION CONFIRMATION IN THE SUPPLIER NOTES. Tops Skills: 1. Lucidworks Fusion 2. Apache Solr 3. Fusion pipelines, query workflows, collections, and connectors Skillset Details: Required • 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. Preferred • Generative AI and Agentic AI exposure. • Semantic Search and Vector Search implementations. • Java, Python, REST APIs. • Microservices architecture. • E-commerce search domain experience. Job Description/Responsibilities: 1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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. 5. 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. 6. 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. 7. 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. 8. 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. 9. 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. 10. 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.