We're looking for a Principal Search/AI Engineer to join our team of search experts and serve as technical lead on large-scale search modernization projects and programs for Fortune-1000 clients. You will collaborate with our established search practice to design, build, and optimize AI-powered search platforms that deliver rich content and product discovery experiences. In this role, you'll drive technical excellence across multi-year digital transformation initiatives, lead solution architecture, and mentor engineering teams while implementing cutting-edge search solutions enhanced with AI and agentic capabilities for our retail, e-commerce, and enterprise clients.
Essential functions
Search Platform Leadership • Lead technical architecture and strategy for complex search modernization programs spanning multiple years and teams • Drive end-to-end ownership of Lucene-based search platforms (Solr/Elasticsearch/OpenSearch) including schema design, index pipelines, scaling, and monitoring • Architect high-throughput, low-latency Java services that expose search functionality via REST/gRPC APIs • Design and implement advanced search relevance strategies including semantic search, hybrid approaches, and AI-enhanced ranking • Perform sophisticated relevance tuning leveraging BM25, TF-IDF, vector similarity, and learning-to-rank methodologies
AI and Agentic Search Innovation • Prototype and productionize next-generation search features including faceted navigation, autocomplete/type-ahead, spell-checking, vector search, and hybrid retrieval • Lead integration of AI-powered conversational search, intelligent query understanding, and agentic workflows to enable natural-language and multi-turn search experiences • Architect and implement agentic AI frameworks (LangGraph, LangChain) for multi-agent search workflows and intelligent content discovery
Technical Leadership and Collaboration • Partner with data scientists and ML engineers to deploy and optimize PyTorch-based ranking models for query understanding, embeddings, and re-ranking • Lead design and implementation of data pipelines (Python/Java/Spark/Dataflow) to generate training signals from user behavior analytics • Mentor and guide engineering teams on search best practices, performance optimization, and emerging AI technologies • Drive technical decision-making across cross-functional teams and stakeholder groups
Quality and Operational Excellence • Establish comprehensive metrics, alerting, and automated testing frameworks to guarantee SLA compliance at enterprise scale • Lead performance profiling and capacity planning for indexes serving hundreds of millions of documents or SKUs • Drive continuous improvement initiatives for search relevance, performance, and user experience metrics
Qualifications
Would be a plus
We offer
About us
Grid Dynamics (NASDAQ: GDYN) is a leading provider of technology consulting, platform and product engineering, AI, and advanced analytics services. Fusing technical vision with business acumen, we solve the most pressing technical challenges and enable positive business outcomes for enterprise companies undergoing business transformation. A key differentiator for Grid Dynamics is our 8 years of experience and leadership in enterprise AI, supported by profound expertise and ongoing investment in data, analytics, cloud & DevOps, application modernization and customer experience. Founded in 2006, Grid Dynamics is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices across the Americas, Europe, and India.