BigCommerce, part of the Commerce brand family, helps merchants increase sales at every stage of their growth. From small startups to mid-market businesses and large enterprises, we provide the leading e-commerce platform. Our customers can then concentrate on what's most important: growing their businesses. We enable our customers to build, innovate, and grow, collectively reshaping the e-commerce industry.
What You’ll Do
Architect the Future of Search: Lead the design and implementation of semantic search capabilities, utilizing OpenSearch to build a robust, hybrid search (BM25 + vector) capability from the ground up
Iterate & Optimize: Continuously evaluate, benchmark, and fine-tune search relevance, ranking models, and k-NN/neural search configurations within OpenSearch
Own the Indexing Pipeline: Maintain, scale, and evolve our core data ingestion and indexing pipelines (built on MySQL, Kafka/RabbitMQ, and backend microservices) to seamlessly support dense vector ingestion and de-duplicated, resilient synchronization
Technical Leadership: Guide the technical roadmap for the Search team, establish engineering best practices, and mentor senior and mid-level engineers through complex architectural decisions
Production Excellence: Ensure the search platform meets ultra-low latency requirements and high-availability SLAs under massive, concurrent traffic loads while participating in the team's on-call rotation
Who Are You
Experience: 7+ years of professional software development experience, with a proven track record in a technical leadership or staff-level capacity
OpenSearch/Elasticsearch Expertise: Deep hands-on experience building, scaling, and fine-tuning OpenSearch (or Elasticsearch) clusters at scale
Semantic & Hybrid Search: Proven experience implementing semantic search, working with text embeddings, vector databases, and configuring hybrid search scoring models
Strong Backend Fundamentals: High proficiency in a strongly typed language like GoLang, Scala, or Java, alongside experience with languages like PHP
Data Pipelines: Strong experience with relational databases (MySQL), schema design, and distributed messaging tools (Kafka or RabbitMQ) for heavy data mutation and indexing
Familiarity with the OpenSearch Neural Search plugin, k-NN search, or Learning to Rank (LTR)
Experience migrating large-scale search infrastructure from traditional Elasticsearch configurations to advanced OpenSearch semantic implementations
Experience setting up automated search quality measurement frameworks (e.g., NDCG, MRR)
Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) in a cloud environment
#LI-REMOTE
#LI-MP2
(Pay Transparency Range: $182,000.00 – $259,000.00)
Work Where You Thrive
Commerce is a remote-first company. For team members in Austin, Atlanta, and London, we offer optional collaborative workspaces for team gatherings, workshops, and in-person connection. Use them whenever they’re helpful, balancing focused individual work with meaningful in-person collaboration.
Compensation Transparency
The national base salary range for this role is posted above in this job post.
Final compensation will be determined based on factors such as relevant experience, skills, qualifications and geographic location. We also consider internal equity to help ensure fair and consistent pay practices across our teams.
Where applicable, this role may also be eligible for variable compensation (such as bonus or commission), equity, and benefits in accordance with local policies. Details will be shared during the hiring process. We are committed to equitable and transparent pay practices that align to market data, internal equity, and individual contribution.
Inclusion and Belonging
At Commerce, we believe that celebrating the unique histories, perspectives and abilities of every employee makes a difference for our company, our customers and our community. We are an equal opportunity employer and the inclusive atmosphere we build together will make room for every person to contribute, grow and thrive.
We are committed to creating an inclusive and accessible hiring experience for all candidates. If you require accommodations or adjustments at any stage of the recruitment process, please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.
Learn more about the Commerce team, culture and benefits at https://www.commerce.com/careers/
Identity Verification
To protect our candidates and company from fraudulent activity, our interview process includes a government ID and biometric verification via Persona, our trusted identity verification provider. All information is collected and processed securely in accordance with applicable privacy laws.
Protect Yourself Against Hiring Scams: Our Corporate Disclaimer
Commerce, along with many other employers, has become the subject of fraudulent job offers to hopeful prospective job seekers.
Be advised
Commerce does not offer jobs to individuals who do not go through our formal hiring process.
Commerce will never
require payment of recruitment fees from candidates;
request personally identifiable information through unsanctioned websites or applications;
attempt to solicit money from you as part of the hiring process or as part of an employment offer;
solicit money to complete visa requirements as part of a job offer.
If you receive unsolicited offers of employment from Commerce, we urge you to be extremely cautious and avoid engaging or responding.
