Solr Back End Engineer

 Solr Backend Engineer 

Progressive Technology Federal Systems, Inc. (PTFS) has been a leading enterprise Content Services Platform (eCSP) to Federal, Civilian and DoD agencies, has an opening for a Solr Backend Engineer.
 
Duties: The Solr Backend Engineer serves is responsible for the design, development, and support of custom code and open-source components that power the SolrCloud search engine. The Java-based code includes springboot java services, parsers, query parsers, publisher, consistency check, APIs, monitoring utilities, and XSLT transforms. The candidate will work with state-of-the-art technologies including Solr/SolrCloud, Lucene, Zookeeper, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Linux, Groovy, Python, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, DevSecOps, Jenkins, Maven, GitLab, Nexus, Ansible, TDD, BDD, JMeter, and other open-source frameworks.

Skills qualifications (Required): 

• 7 years of experience as a backend engineer working with the Solr search engine on enterprise-scale information retrieval systems.
• Hands-on experience integrating custom Java applications with Solr.
• Strong background indexing high-volume content and metadata into Solr.
• Deep experience building and maintaining custom query parsers and request handlers using Lucene APIs.
• Solid experience developing REST services and Java-based search API layers with SolrJ.
• Expertise in query optimization, caching, and relevance tuning.
• Practical experience designing and maintaining schemas, including custom analyzers and tokenizers.
• Skilled in troubleshooting multi-tier systems on Linux, profiling Java applications, and tuning the JVM.
• Experience creating custom parsers for structured and unstructured content using core Java, regular expressions, and NLP.
• Strong XML skills, including JAXP parsing and XSLT/XPath for indexing workflows.
• Experience using templating engines and dynamic languages to decorate search results and extend Java APIs, such as Groovy, Scala, or Python.
• Monitoring experience with Prometheus and Grafana.
• DevOps experience with Git or GitLab, Jenkins, Maven, Ansible, and Nexus.
• Experience with TDD or BDD, test automation, and performance testing.
• Experience working in Agile teams, including Scrum or Kanban.
• Strong written documentation skills.

Preferred qualifications (Not required): 

• Docker and Kubernetes for containerized deployments and microservices.   
• Microsoft Azure or AWS.
• Experience with machine learning, natural language processing, and vector search.

Eligibility: 

• US Citizen with a minimum of three years continuous residency in the USA.
• You must be authorized to legally work in the U.S., PTFS will not sponsor any visas at this time.
• Eligibility for a Public Trust required. 

Benefits:

• 15 days PTO per year
• 11 paid holidays per year
• Medical, Dental & Vision
• 401(k) Plan with matching
• Tuition assistance
• Disability insurance
• Gym in the Rockville, MD office