Search Engineer

Who we are:

At UST, we help the world’s best organizations grow and succeed through transformation. Bringing together the right talent, tools, and ideas, we work with our client to co-create lasting change. Together, with over 30,000 employees in 30+ countries, we build for boundless impact—touching billions of lives in the process. Visit us at UST.com.

Job Description

Summary -

We are hiring a Search Engineer to support and develop our UK search platforms. You will work across Apache Solr and Amazon OpenSearch (including Serverless), covering production support, search development, and a live Solr to OpenSearch migration.

This role suits someone who has worked L1, L2, and L3 search issues on a large distributed estate - Solr or Elasticsearch on EC2 or on-prem RHEL and can debug from logs, cluster state, and AWS CloudWatch or Splunk. Day-to-day work is hands-on: Bash, operational scripts, search changes, and using AI effectively to investigate and deliver faster.

What you'll do

• Own L1/L2/L3 search support: triage latency, indexing failures, cluster instability, auth/TLS, and query regressions, then drive RCA and lasting fixes.
• Debug distributed Solr and Elasticsearch/OpenSearch clusters on AWS EC2 and, where relevant, on-prem RHEL, using CloudWatch, Splunk, host logs, and cluster APIs.
• Develop and improve search: schemas, analyzers, indexing, queries, relevance, and search APIs.
• Contribute to the Solr to OpenSearch migration, including schema and query translation and relevancy and performance checks.
• Write and maintain Bash and operational automation for deploy, day-2 support, and incident response.
• Use AI and prompt engineering as part of daily engineering work - investigation, scripting, and delivery.
• Partner with product and platform teams on indexing pipelines, APIs, and AWS infrastructure.

What you'll bring

• Strong production experience with Solr and/or Elasticsearch on EC2 or on-prem RHEL, including a large distributed, multi-node estate.
• A track record of resolving L1/L2/L3 search incidents, not only feature work.
• Solid Lucene fundamentals: schema, analyzers, relevancy, shards, replicas, and cluster operations.
• Hands-on Bash and comfort with AWS day-2 operations, especially CloudWatch, Splunk, or direct log analysis on RHEL hosts.
• Ability to develop search changes in Java and/or Python; SQL and RDBMS-backed indexing are useful.
• Practical use of AI tools and prompt engineering to speed up debugging, scripting, and implementation.
• Clear communication under incident pressure.

Nice to have

• OpenSearch, including Serverless, or a Solr to OpenSearch / Elasticsearch migration.
• A Solr major-version upgrade.
• Gatling, Locust, or similar performance testing.
• Custom search plugins or matching and relevance APIs.
• Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Harness, or Jenkins.
• C++, Okta/JWT, LDAP, SigV4, or TLS operational experience.
• AWS certification.

What we believe:

We’re proud to embrace the same values that have shaped UST since the beginning. Since day one, we’ve been building enduring relationships and a culture of integrity. And today, it's those same values that are inspiring us to encourage innovation from everyone, to champion diversity and inclusion and to place people at the centre of everything we do.

Humility:

We will listen, learn, be empathetic and help selflessly in our interactions with everyone.

Humanity:

Through business, we will better the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves.

Integrity:

We honour our commitments and act with responsibility in all our relationships.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

UST is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We believe that no one should be discriminated against because of their differences, such as age, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity and expression, religion, or sexual orientation.

All employment decisions shall be made without regard to age, race, creed, colour, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, disability status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, citizenship status or any other basis as protected by federal, state, or local law.

UST reserves the right to periodically redefine your roles and responsibilities based on the requirements of the organization and/or your performance.

• To support and promote the values of UST.

• Comply with all Company policies and procedures