Executive Job Title	Search Engine Architect
Type of Registrant	Rites-Honored Recruiter
Location	California
Industry & Function 1:	Computers-Hardware&Consulting - PROGRAMMING&Engineering(See-AlsoR&D)
Compensation	$150,000 to $300,000
Executive Job Description	Search Engine Architect (FULL TIME/ No Consultants) 150-200 k + Stock and Relocation San Francisco Bay Area Contact: Ron Anderson - Senior Partner- Anderson & McGinley Mobile: 415.385.8462 Ron@andersonmcginley.com OVERVIEW: We are a fast-growing company thriving through the economic downturn by providing a unique and much needed travel service. We are looking for an outstanding engineer with strong Java application development skills and a background in vertical search. The successful candidate will have a direct impact on the company’s core search engine development. RESPONSIBILITIES: Own the architecture design and development of our search engine application, taking the current implementation and ensuring it provides high quality search result ranking and the ability to scale to massively. EXPERIENCE (Required): 5 years designing and hands on building of high volume Java applications for the web. Hands on experience developing Lucene/SOLR based search applications Proven experience rapidly re-architecting systems for ease of development and scale 3 years experience working in a rapidly growing start up environment Proven ability to design either a database schema or ontology. Hands on experience using high performing SQL with very large data sets. Native speaker of the UNIX command line, XML and regular expressions. Embraces test driven development methodologies Is very familiar with common collaboration and code/build management tools such as SVN, Ant, Maven. Able to work effectively as an individual contributor with team of wide spread talent. Able to defend their architectural and design decisions with a very talented technical team Likes to work in a collaborative team environment. Ability to shift gears quickly in a start-up environment. The successful candidate will have previously worked in small start up vertical search environments or possibly a social networking site and have a desire to do so again. EXPERIENCE (Ideal): Large search company experience as well as start up company experience. Experience scaling SQL applications to massive scale EXPERIENCE (nice to have): Rich experience with web application technologies: Web services, XML, SOAP, SAX, Ruby on Rails, Active Record and/or J2EE technologies including EJB, Spring, Hibernate. A MUST HAVE: Search Architect must have these characteristics and skills: Objective of Position: Bring vertical search expertise to significantly improve the relevancy and recall of our system and ensure we have the right architecture to support massive scale. Definition of success: Contributes the search methodology expertise to the team in a way that delivers 80% higher recall and precision than we have achieved so date for all aspects of the data pipeline and search relevancy. Lead the technical innovation around search relevancy: Understand all aspects of the system and deliver state of the art implementations to improve precision and recall. Own the overall architecture of the Extracting the data about those products Extracting positive and negative sentiments about those products Successful candidate will have. Lead a vertical search engineering team The ability to define what is needed to deliver significant improvements in search relevancy Ability to design and articulate architecture Current hands on experience developing vertical search relevancy algorithms Ability to gain the respect of and lead a highly skilled engineering team Strong mathematical background Applied knowledge of machine learning algorithms to solve classification problems Recent start up experience Ability to produce production ready code Java expertise (Solid). It is not enough to have: Current hands on experience architecting a search system Been a search algorithm research/developer Worked only in a large company Worked only in a research capacity Be a strong system programmer within a search company Generalist vs Specialist The right candidate with be a generalist with experience in multiple domains in this area. Hands on vs Architect. Right now we need people that can do, people who can deliver fast. The right candidate is one who is currently coding daily. Can prove this at the white board and has the breadth of experience to be able to think beyond our current implementation to the problems we are actually trying to solve. This is my mind is a "hands on architect". Large company vs small company experience. Right now we are a very small company. Someone who had spent years at a large company would typically not do well in this environment even if they have domain specific knowledge. There are two key reasons. 1) The process and demands of a start up environment vs the managed and supported framework of a larger company. 2) The specialization that typically evolves in a large company. We need someone who can think outside of a small domain. Someone who has worked in both environments, very small start up and large companies (Ideally through acquisition) would be fine. Domain specific knowledge vs technical skills Domain specific knowledge is much more important to us than particular language skills.
APPLY for this JOB