Lead AI Engineer

This is Vamshi ,from Software Technology We have a job opening with our client for position Lead AI Engineer If you are available and looking for any new opportunities, please send me your updated resume for below position ASAP.

Job Title: Lead AI Engineer
Location: Austin, Texas (Hybrid)

Duration: Longterm Contract

Lead AI Engineer (Search Modernization)

Mandatory Skills: Elastic Search, OpenSearch, Python, LLM, GenAI, Semantic Search, Re-Ranking, AWS, Search Engineer

Job Description:

We are looking for an AI Engineer to modernize and enhance our existing regex/keyword-based Elastic Search system by integrating state-of-the-art semantic search, dense retrieval, and LLM-powered ranking techniques.
This role will drive the transformation of traditional search into an intelligent, context-aware, personalized, and high-precision search experience.

The ideal candidate has hands-on experience with Elastic Search internals, information retrieval (IR), embedding-based search, BM25, re-ranking, LLM-based retrieval pipelines, and AWS cloud deployment.

Roles & Responsibilities

Modernizing the Search Platform

• Analyze limitations in current regex & keyword-only search implementation on ElasticSearch.
• Enhance search relevance using:
  • BM25 tuning
  • Synonyms, analyzers, custom tokenizers
  • Boosting strategies and scoring optimization
• Introduce semantic / vector-based search using dense embeddings.

2. LLM-Driven Search & RAG Integration

• Implement LLM-powered search workflows including:
  • Query rewriting and expansion
  • Embedding generation (OpenAI, Cohere, Sentence Transformers, etc.)
  • Hybrid retrieval (BM25 vector search)
  • Re-ranking using cross-encoders or LLM evaluators
• Build RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) flows using ElasticSearch vectors, OpenSearch, or AWS-native tools.

3. Search Infrastructure Engineering

• Build and optimize search APIs for latency, relevance, and throughput.
• Design scalable pipelines for:
  • Indexing structured and unstructured text
  • Maintaining embedding stores
  • Real-time incremental updates
• Implement caching, failover, and search monitoring dashboards.

4. AWS Cloud Delivery

• Deploy and operate solutions on AWS, leveraging:
  • OpenSearch Service or EC2-managed ElasticSearch
  • Lambda, ECS/EKS, API Gateway, SQS/SNS
  • SageMaker for embedding generation or re-ranking models
• Implement CI/CD for search models and pipelines.

5. Evaluation & Continuous Improvement

• Develop search evaluation metrics (nDCG, MRR, precision@k, recall).
• Conduct A/B experiments to measure improvements.
• Tune ranking functions and hybrid search scoring.
• Partner with product teams to refine search behaviors with real usage patterns.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 5 10 years of experience in AI/ML, NLP, or IR systems, with hands-on search engineering.
• Strong expertise in ElasticSearch/OpenSearch: analyzers, mappings, scoring, BM25, aggregations, vectors.
• Experience with semantic search:
  • Embeddings (BERT, SBERT, Llama, GPT-based, Cohere)
  • Vector databases or ES vector fields
  • Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) techniques
• Working knowledge of LLM-based retrieval and RAG architectures.
• Proficient in Python; familiarity with Java/Scala is a plus.
• Hands-on AWS experience (OpenSearch, SageMaker, Lambda, ECS/EKS, EC2, S3, IAM).
• Experience building and deploying APIs using FastAPI/Flask and containerizing with Docker.
• Familiar with typical IR metrics and search evaluation frameworks.

Preferred Skills

• Knowledge of cross-encoder and bi-encoder architectures for re-ranking.
• Experience with query understanding, spell correction, autocorrect, and autocomplete features.
• Exposure to LLMOps / MLOps in search use cases.
• Understanding of multi-modal search (text images) is a plus.
• Experience with knowledge graphs or metadata-aware search.

Thanks,

Vamshi Thangadpalli

Technical Recruiter

Email: | Web:

100 Overlook Center, Suite 200

Princeton, NJ 08540.