Principal Search Engineer

As a Principal Search Engineer, you will serve as the technical owner and architect of Nasuni's distributed search and MCP SaaS platform. This role is designed for a senior individual contributor who thrives at the intersection of deep technical execution and long-term platform strategy.

This role is for engineers who want to design and operate mission-critical search systems at scale, influence platform direction, and mentor others without people management responsibilities.

Responsibilities:

• Own end-to-end technical design and architectural decisions for the 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 optimisation to meet SLOs for latency, throughput, and availability.
• Establish best practices for cluster management, observability, and incident response.
• Drive technology selection and architectural decisions while balancing scalability, reliability, and cost.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership on long-term 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.

Requirements:

• 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.
• Advanced relevance tuning experience (custom analysers, tokenisation, 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.
• Experience with Learning to Rank (LTR) or ML-based relevance models.
• Prior ownership of a search platform serving hundreds of customers.
• Experience modernising or replacing legacy search architectures.
• Contributions to OpenSearch/Elasticsearch ecosystems or internal platform frameworks.