[Hiring] Search Engineer @Leidos

Role Description

Leidos is seeking a Search Engineer to support, enhance, and modernize our enterprise search platform for a Federal customer. This role is responsible for both software development and operations & maintenance of search applications and indexing pipelines built on Apache Solr, Flume, Spark, Linux, Microsoft SQL Server, and AWS OpenSearch.

The engineer will ensure day-to-day reliability of indexing and retrieval services by addressing:

• Indexing failures
• Data issues
• Search syntax and relevance problems
• Performance degradation
• Vulnerability remediation
• Patching
• Recurring maintenance activities

This role also supports bulk indexing operations, synonym refreshes, name normalization, data purges, and SLA restoration for search and retrieval services.

In addition to supporting the existing environment, this role will help evolve the platform toward modern search capabilities using:

• AWS OpenSearch
• Semantic search
• Vector embedding
• Hybrid retrieval
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

The ideal candidate combines strong hands-on troubleshooting and operational ownership with practical experience in search engineering, data pipelines, and cloud-based modernization.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, enterprise search, search platform support, information retrieval, or large-scale data systems.
• Hands-on experience supporting and enhancing enterprise search platforms such as Apache Solr, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Lucene, or similar technologies.
• Experience working in Linux production environments, including troubleshooting, configuration updates, and routine system support.
• Strong experience with indexing, schema design, mappings, analyzers, query processing, search relevance tuning, and performance optimization.
• Experience supporting batch or large-scale data ingestion and processing pipelines using Spark and related technologies.
• Strong programming skills in Java and/or Python.
• Working knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server, including the ability to query source data, validate data flows, investigate discrepancies, and analyze indexing or operational metrics.
• Experience using log monitoring and observability tools to investigate failures and support operational troubleshooting; exposure to Azure Log Analytics strongly preferred.
• Experience troubleshooting distributed systems, indexing pipelines, data synchronization issues, and production search clusters.
• Experience supporting SLA-driven operational environments with accountability for service restoration, recurring maintenance, and issue resolution.
• Ability to understand and work with validation, comparison, and support tools used to verify data accuracy between source and target systems.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to work across engineering, operations, and stakeholder teams.
• Work in US eastern time zone, and available to travel to Washington, DC area once a year.
• Ability to clear Public Trust Clearance.

Requirements

• Experience administering and tuning AWS OpenSearch in production environments.
• Experience modernizing legacy search platforms and migrating workloads from Solr to OpenSearch or similar cloud-native search technologies.
• Experience with semantic search, vector search, embeddings, hybrid retrieval, and AI-assisted search solutions.
• Experience supporting or implementing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) retrieval pipelines. Any exposure in integrating knowledge graph with RAG pipeline is preferred.
• Familiarity with chunking strategies, metadata enrichment, synonym management, reranking, and retrieval optimization.
• Experience measuring and improving search quality using metrics such as precision, recall, MRR, NDCG, and latency.
• Experience with Apache Flume, Kafka, or similar ingestion and streaming technologies.
• Experience building automation for maintenance operations, data validation, bulk indexing, and support workflows.
• Experience in utilizing GenAI in optimizing the O&M processes, continuous improvements and/or driving innovations.
• Experience working in regulated, security-sensitive, or government environments.
• Experience supporting enterprise document retrieval, knowledge discovery, or content search use cases.

Company Description

Original Posting: April 21, 2026

For U.S. Positions: While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.

Pay Range: $87,100.00 - $157,450.00

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.