Principal Search Engineer - Java, Elastic Search, Solr

Principal Search Engineer - Java, Elastic Search, Solr

Location: Hyderabad, India, (Hybrid - 3 Days Onsite / 2 Days Remote)

About Nasuni

Nasuni is a profitable, growing SaaS data infrastructure company reinventing enterprise file storage and data management in an AI-driven world. We power the data infrastructure of the world’s most innovative enterprises. Backed by Vista Equity Partners and Goldman Sachs, our engineers are building what’s next with AI. Our platform lets businesses seamlessly store, access, protect, and unlock AI-driven insights from exploding volumes of unstructured file data. As an engineer here, you’ll help build AI-powered infrastructure trusted by 900+ global customers, including Dow, Mattel, and Autodesk.

Nasuni is headquartered in Boston, USA with offices in Cork-Ireland, London-UK and an India Innovation Center in Hyderabad India.. The company’s recent Annual Revenue is $160M and growing at 25% CAGR.

We have a hybrid work culture. 3 days a week working from the Hyderabad office during core working hours and 2 days working from home.

Principal Search Engineer – Distributed Search & SaaS Platforms

Role Overview

Nasuni is building the future of AI-powered enterprise file data infrastructure, and search is a foundational capability of that platform.

As a Principal Search Engineer, you will serve as the technical owner and architect of Nasuni’s distributed search and MCP SaaS platform. This role is designed for a senior individual contributor who thrives at the intersection of deep technical execution and long-term platform strategy.

This role is for engineers who want to design and operate mission-critical search systems at scale, influence platform direction, and mentor others without people management responsibilities.

Level & Scope Definition (Principal IC)

Autonomy & Ownership

• Owns end-to-end technical design of Nasuni’s search platform
• Makes architectural decisions within the search domain
• Operates with minimal oversight once goals are aligned

Decision-Making Authority

• Technology selection, architecture patterns, performance strategies
• Tradeoffs impacting scalability, reliability, and cost
• Influences roadmap but does not own product prioritization

Impact Radius

• Core SaaS platform used by 900+ enterprise customers
• Multi-tenant, petabyte-scale unstructured data
• Cross-team influence across product and platform engineering

Collaboration Model

• Partners closely with Product Management
• Serves as technical escalation point for search-related initiatives
• Mentors engineers through design reviews and code quality leadership

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and own the end-to-end search and MCP platform, including ingestion, indexing, query execution, and relevance tuning
• Define and evolve scalable OpenSearch-based architectures for multi-tenant SaaS environments
• Lead performance optimization efforts to meet strict SLOs for latency, throughput, and availability
• Establish best practices for cluster management, observability, and incident response
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership on multi-year technical roadmaps
• Serve as the primary technical integration point between search and core product teams
• Mentor and guide engineers through technical reviews and architectural decision-making

Qualifications

Must-Have Qualifications

• 10+ years of overall software engineering experience, with 7+ years focused on search systems
• Hands-on experience with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or Solr in production environments
• Proven ownership of large-scale, multi-tenant search platforms (terabytes of indexed data or more)
• Deep expertise in Java, including high-performance, low-latency services
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, fault tolerance, and data consistency
• Experience operating search systems in cloud environments (AWS and/or Azure)
• Production experience with Kubernetes-based deployments

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced relevance tuning experience (custom analyzers, tokenization, scoring models)
• Experience designing search ingestion pipelines for unstructured data
• Operational ownership of on-call, incident response, and reliability metrics
• Working knowledge of Python for scripting, tooling, or data pipelines

Ideal Experience

• Experience with Learning to Rank (LTR) or ML-based relevance models
• Prior ownership of a search platform serving hundreds of customers
• Experience modernizing or replacing legacy search architectures
• Contributions to OpenSearch/Elasticsearch ecosystems or internal platform frameworks

Why Work at Nasuni – Hyderabad?

As part of our commitment to your well-being and growth, Nasuni offers competitive benefits designed to support every stage of your life and career:

• Competitive compensation programs
• Flexible time off and leave policies
• Comprehensive health and wellness coverage
• Hybrid and flexible work arrangements
• Employee referral and recognition programs
• Professional development and learning support
• Inclusive, collaborative team culture
• Modern office spaces with team events and perks
• Retirement and statutory benefits as per Indian regulations

To all recruitment agencies: Nasuni does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our job boards, Nasuni employees or any other company location. Nasuni is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.

Nasuni is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive, and respectful workplace where every team member can thrive. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, caste, color, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, age, national origin, or any other status protected by applicable laws in India or the country of employment. We celebrate individuality and are committed to building a workplace that reflects the diversity of the communities we serve. If you require accommodation during the recruitment process, please let us know.