Principal Search Engineer

Role Overview: As a Principal Search Engineer at Nasuni, you will be responsible for serving as the technical owner and architect of Nasunis distributed search and MCP SaaS platform. This role is designed for a senior individual contributor who excels in deep technical execution and long-term platform strategy. You will have the opportunity to design and operate mission-critical search systems at scale, influence platform direction, and mentor others without people management responsibilities. Key Responsibilities: - Architect and own the end-to-end search and MCP platform, including ingestion, indexing, query execution, and relevance tuning - Define and evolve scalable OpenSearch-based architectures for multi-tenant SaaS environments - Lead performance optimization efforts to meet strict SLOs for latency, throughput, and availability - Establish best practices for cluster management, observability, and incident response - Partner with Product and Engineering leadership on multi-year technical roadmaps - Serve as the primary technical integration point between search and core product teams - Mentor and guide engineers through technical reviews and architectural decision-making Qualifications: Must-Have Qualifications: - 10+ years of overall software engineering experience, with 7+ years focused on search systems - Hands-on experience with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or Solr in production environments - Proven ownership of large-scale, multi-tenant search platforms (terabytes of indexed data or more) - Deep expertise in Java, including high-performance, low-latency services - Strong understanding of distributed systems, fault tolerance, and data consistency - Experience operating search systems in cloud environments (AWS and/or Azure) - Production experience with Kubernetes-based deployments Preferred Qualifications: - Advanced relevance tuning experience (custom analyzers, tokenization, scoring models) - Experience designing search ingestion pipelines for unstructured data - Operational ownership of on-call, incident response, and reliability metrics - Working knowledge of Python for scripting, tooling, or data pipelines Ideal Experience: - Experience with Learning to Rank (LTR) or ML-based relevance models - Prior ownership of a search platform serving hundreds of customers - Experience modernizing or replacing legacy search architectures - Contributions to OpenSearch/Elasticsearch ecosystems or internal platform frameworks Additional Details: Nasuni is a profitable, growing SaaS data infrastructure company reinventing enterprise file storage and data management in an AI-driven world. The company is backed by Vista Equity Partners and Goldman Sachs and has a hybrid work culture with 3 days a week in the office and 2 days remote. Nasuni is committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive, and respectful workplace where every team member can thrive. Note: No additional details of the company are mentioned in the provided job description. Role Overview: As a Principal Search Engineer at Nasuni, you will be responsible for serving as the technical owner and architect of Nasunis distributed search and MCP SaaS platform. This role is designed for a senior individual contributor who excels in deep technical execution and long-term platform strategy. You will have the opportunity to design and operate mission-critical search systems at scale, influence platform direction, and mentor others without people management responsibilities. Key Responsibilities: - Architect and own the end-to-end search and MCP platform, including ingestion, indexing, query execution, and relevance tuning - Define and evolve scalable OpenSearch-based architectures for multi-tenant SaaS environments - Lead performance optimization efforts to meet strict SLOs for latency, throughput, and availability - Establish best practices for cluster management, observability, and incident response - Partner with Product and Engineering leadership on multi-year technical roadmaps - Serve as the primary technical integration point between search and core product teams - Mentor and guide engineers through technical reviews and architectural decision-making Qualifications: Must-Have Qualifications: - 10+ years of overall software engineering experience, with 7+ years focused on search systems - Hands-on experience with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or Solr in production environments - Proven ownership of large-scale, multi-tenant search platforms (terabytes of indexed data or more) - Deep expertise in Java, including high-performance, low-latency services - Strong understanding of distributed systems, fault tolerance, and data consistency - Experience operating search systems in cloud environments (AWS and/or Azure) - Production experience with Kubernetes-based deployments Preferred Qualifications: - Advanced relevance tuning experience (custom analyzers, tokenization, scoring models) - Experience designing search ingestion pipelines for unstructured da