Associate Tech Lead / Tech Lead – Elasticsearch Engineering (Search Systems)

We’re a boutique agency—small yet impactful—gaining real momentum helping B2B eCommerce industry giants transform digitally with our specialized products and services.

Today, our wins are clear in the multi-million dollar weekly sales achieved online by our clients based in the USA and around the world. And for tomorrow, we’re strengthening our solutions through innovation, customization, and smart AI integration.

When you join Villvay, you don't just join a 'friendly neighborhood offshore development team'—you join a team of solutionizers—critical thinkers who see the whole picture, tackle problems end-to-end, and bring more to the table than anyone expects.

We’re looking for an Elasticsearch expert who can turn complex enterprise data into search experiences that just work — fast, relevant, and reliable. You’ll own the architecture, tuning, and experimentation of high-performance search systems powering global B2B eCommerce platforms. This role is for someone who loves digging into search internals, mentoring teams, and turning technical depth into tangible business impact.

Role

• Architect and evolve high-performance search systems that power enterprise B2B eCommerce platforms.
• Design smart indexing pipelines and fine-tune search relevance to deliver lightning-fast, meaningful results.
• Build APIs and services that transform complex data into seamless search experiences.
• Partner with product and client teams to translate search challenges into scalable technical solutions.
• Develop and refine search quality evaluation loops (offline + online) to continuously improve precision and recall.
• Partner with data science, UX, and business teams to translate ambiguous “search frustration” into quantifiable improvements.
• Prototype and deploy custom scoring models and rerankers (function score, LTR, RRF, hybrid scoring).
• Mentor engineers on search tuning, data modeling, and experimentation best practices.
• Work closely with leadership on the roadmap for Search-as-a-Service and enterprise-grade scalability.
• Represent Villvay in client demos and technical discussions with clarity and confidence.

Core Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years hands-on with Elasticsearch in production systems.
• Strong fundamentals in Java, Node.js, or TypeScript, with deep understanding of API and service-layer architecture.
• Practical experience with scalable, distributed systems and data streaming (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.).
• Strong command of indexing strategy, analyzers, relevance tuning, and custom scoring.
• Hands-on with Elasticsearch DSL, script scoring, boosting, and query-time weighting.
• Experience with evaluation frameworks: A/B tests, click logs, judgments, or custom quality metrics.
• Exposure to hybrid and vector search, BM25F, RRF, or semantic reranking models.
• Familiarity with NLP, tokenization, stemming/lemmatization, and synonym curation.
• Ability to debug relevance (analyzers, term vectors, scoring breakdowns) and tune query pipelines.
• Strong analytical mindset and fluency in precision@k, recall, NDCG, MRR, CTR metrics.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder alignment skills in client-facing contexts.

Added Advantages

• Hands-on experience with vector search or hybrid search (BM25 + embeddings).
• Familiarity with Bloomreach, Algolia, or OpenSearch ecosystems.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes, AWS, or CI/CD pipelines.
• Contributions to open-source search or Elasticsearch plugins.

Villvay is an equal opportunity employer. But here are some job perks we are best known for:

• Competitive salaries for those who meet our high bar.
• Opportunities to network and connect with a global team, working with international clients and aided by world class consultants.
• A hybrid work model to bring out the best kind of productivity in our teams.
• Paid parental leave to genuinely encourage a healthy family life style.
• Paid menstrual leave because we believe in equity.
• A flat structure supported by a boutique concept of quality and transparency.
• OPD and Insurance because life happens, even during your probation period.

If you’re not just looking for a job—but looking to make things better, apply now.

You at Villvay

To become a VVayfinder means you are driven by purpose, curiosity and the need to leave things better than how you found them. You might be an ideal fit if you:

• Care deeply about how you can add value by doing purposeful work.
• Learn fast and adapt faster, seeking professional and personal growth.
• Bring critical thought and opinions to the table.
• Are fundamentally detailed and thorough, whatever the contribution may be.
• Using AI as a natural extension of your work, not an add-on.
• Work well with a competitive team, welcome what is different and makes good use of our feedback culture.
• Treat change as an opportunity—not a blocker, thriving in complexity and challenge.

For more on who we hire, check out our blog post → The Ideal VVayfinder

To make a real impact working with an unrelenting team, apply now.