Lead Search Engineer F/H

We’re hiring a Lead Search Engineer to own the migration of our search infrastructure to a new platform that will meet our long-term objectives in capacity, performance, and features. You’ll become the long-term technical authority on search quality at Qobuz — designing schemas, ranking logic, and query pipelines that serve millions of music lovers around the world.

What you’ll do:

• Lead the design and migration of our search architecture to a modern, scalable platform
• Own search relevance end-to-end: ranking, indexing, query understanding, and evaluation
• Build and maintain the analytics, A/B testing, and KPI frameworks that drive continuous improvement in search quality
• Operate a 24/7 production service handling tens of millions of queries per day under strict latency constraints
• Collaborate closely with product, data, and catalog teams in a small, autonomous environment where you own the full stack from data pipeline to query serving

What we’re looking for:

• Proven experience building and operating a large production search system
• Strong expertise in full-text and semantic search on large-scale catalogs (100M+ records) across multiple languages
• Hands‑on experience with modern search stacks such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or Vespa
• Experience building ranking, indexing, analytics, and A/B testing pipelines for search
• Experience defining and tracking success and failure KPIs for search quality
• Track record running a 24/7 service with strong operational constraints — tens of millions of queries per day, tight response‑time SLAs
• Solid grounding in information retrieval fundamentals: BM25, text matching, scoring mechanics, relevance tuning
• Experience with AWS cloud architecture
• Comfort with data pipelines and ETL (batch and streaming), working with cloud data warehouses and object storage
• Experience leading at least one major system migration — dual‑write patterns, shadow testing, gradual rollouts, and rollback strategies

Our stack:

• API: PHP (Symfony) — PHP/Symfony experience is a plus
• Data: SQL databases, Snowflake data warehouse
• Cloud: AWS
• Tooling: JIRA, Confluence

Bonus points:

• Experience with metadata quality issues in the music industry
• Experience with personalization algorithms
• Using ML tools to improve metadata quality
• Familiarity with ML‑based ranking techniques (learning to rank, embedding‑based retrieval)
• Knowledge of relevance evaluation metrics (NDCG, MRR, MAP)
• Experience with multilingual and CJK search challenges (tokenization, multi‑script handling)
• Experience working in a small, autonomous team owning the full stack from data pipeline to query serving