We are seeking a hands-on technical manager for the Search Foundation Technologies team located in Bangalore that works extensively with Principal Engineers building out the Navigation and Semantic Search capabilities of the Lucene-based search engine that powers search on Amazon websites worldwide.

The Lucene Search Engine team in the Search Foundation Technologies org designs and develops query serving and indexing components of the Amazon search stack. Our mission-critical service is built with open-source Lucene at its heart.

The service is responsible for matching customer keywords to products in Amazon’s catalog, applies business rules to narrow down the selection and rank selected products using sophisticated algorithms all under a strict latency budget.

Our service is designed to support both lexical and semantic matching using state-of-the-art (SOTA) approximate near neighbor (ANN) search on learned vector representations (embeddings).

This team built out the semantic search platform that now powers semantic search worldwide, and partners with scientists and other teams to provide a best-in-class tier-1 production environment for semantic search operation and experimentation. The team also is building the infrastructure powering new navigation experiences for the Search platform, partnering with scientists in Search to allow for new navigational paradigms using new data sources.


Key job responsibilities
The SDM builds a roadmap for new Search features, working with partner teams to understand requirements (e.g., to build support for new types of bi-encoder models, or support for new features), keeps up-to-date with developments in the Semantic Search space to rapidly integrate upstream features into our search engine (e.g., leveraging vector quantization to improve indexing efficiency), triages and prioritizes incoming partner team requests, optimizes and improves team oncall and support processes, and plans for new project development.

The SDM is responsible for managing a team of talented engineers, helping them grow in their skill-set, and exceling as engineers at Amazon. The SDM works with the team to build new skills, share knowledge across search, and create processes and systems that allow for partners to use the Search platform in a self-service manner, reducing operational burden on the team. The SDM owns important goals that are visible as high as the VP level involving coordination across multiple teams. We are always looking for ways to improve efficiency of our Search system, and make use of the vibrant open-source upstream contributions in the Lucene ecosystem, and team members are encouraged to release work back to the upstream project.


A day in the life
A day in the life of an SDM involves closely working with other engineering teams in Palo Alto, Dublin and Tokyo, and team’s science partners across different orgs to continuously enhance the Lucene KNN platform. The Lucene space brings high potential for innovations and bottom-up ideas, and the SDM brainstorms with the team locally on such ideas, contributes to white-boarding discussions and shape up those ideas to be reviewed with Principal Engineers. For Navigation experience, the SDM works closely with key stakeholders across the Search stack to resolve dependencies and contribute to joint goals.

About the team
The Bangalore Lucene team is a two pizza engineering team that supports Lucene along with two other teams based in Palo Alto, Tokyo, and Dublin. The team was founded three years ago, and built out the production K-Nearest Neighbor search system now powering production semantic search worldwide. The team supports and contributes to Open Source via the Apache Lucene project, and encourages upstream contributions and involvement with the community. As a tier-1 service, there are ample opportunities to contribute high impact changes, improve efficiency at scale, and run highly visible projects in Search.