Senior/Lead Java Developer with search engine expertise

Project Overview

The project focuses on the modernization, maintenance, and development of an eCommerce platform for a large US-based retail company serving millions of omnichannel customers weekly.
Solutions are delivered by several Product Teams focused on:

• Customer
• Loyalty
• Search & Browse
• Data Integration
• Cart

Current priorities: onboarding new brands, re-architecture, database migrations, and migration of microservices to a unified cloud-native solution without any disruption to business.

Key Responsibilities

• Quickly onboard to customer’s processes
• Develop new features in Java and Kotlin for Spring Boot microservices and maintain existing ones
• Improve personalized search
• Modernize data ingestion for faster searching and indexing
• Collaborate with other teams and client to find the best solutions

Mandatory Skills

• English – B2 or higher
• Kotlin, Java Spring Boot, Gradle
• Experience working with search engines
• Experience with semantic search, vector databases, embeddings, and LLMs
• 5+ years of enterprise backend system design experience
• Strong knowledge of Java/Kotlin and Spring/Spring Boot
• Good understanding of search engines (Lucene-based engines preferred: Elasticsearch, Solr, etc.)
• Understanding of semantic search, vector databases, embeddings, and LLMs
• Experience in production development
• Familiarity with SQL/PostgreSQL
• Deep understanding of enterprise architecture patterns
• Experience with distributed systems
• Knowledge of microservice architecture patterns
• Familiarity with containers and orchestration (Kubernetes/PKS/OpenShift)
• Adoption of Agile and DevOps culture
• Strong written and verbal communication skills

Nice-to-Have

• Experience in distributed teams and with US customers
• Experience with Kafka/RabbitMQ and caching (Hazelcast/Redis)
• Experience in hybrid cloud environments or willingness to learn new techniques and approaches