Senior Solr Cloud Administrator
Role Overview
We are seeking a Senior Solr Cloud Administrator for a permanent position to own and evolve the search platform within our SAP Commerce Cloud ecosystem. This role is responsible for the configuration, performance, reliability, analytics, and continuous optimization of Solr Cloud, serving as the technical authority for all search-related capabilities across the commerce platform.
This individual will be the single point of accountability for search, ensuring not only technical excellence, but also actionable business insights derived from search behavior and performance metrics.
Key Responsibilities:
Solr Cloud Configuration & Operations
- Configure, administer, and maintain Solr Cloud clusters used by SAP Commerce Cloud.
- Manage collections, shards, replicas, and failover strategies to ensure high availability and scalability.
- Monitor Solr Cloud health, capacity, and performance, proactively addressing issues.
- Apply best practices for security, stability, and resilience.
Search Optimization & Performance
- Lead index optimization strategies, including schema design, analyzers, tokenizers, faceting, and boosting.
- Optimize search queries to improve relevance, accuracy, and response time.
- Analyze logs and performance metrics to identify tuning opportunities.
- Partner with product, UX, and business teams to improve search relevance and conversion outcomes.
Data Feeds & Indexing
- Design, manage, and optimize data feeds into SAP Commerce Cloud, including:
- Impex-based indexing strategies
- Full and incremental indexing
- Ensure data consistency and quality across environments.
- Troubleshoot indexing failures and data synchronization issues.
Search Analytics & Business Insights
- Define, collect, and report search-related metrics, including but not limited to:
- Search accuracy and relevance indicators
- Search response times and performance trends
- Most frequently searched keywords
- Keywords returning no results
- Search success vs abandonment metrics
- Produce regular insights and dashboards to support business, merchandising, and product decisions.
- Identify opportunities to improve product discoverability and customer experience based on search data.
- Collaborate with stakeholders to translate analytics into concrete optimization actions.
Change & Upgrade Management
- Own all search-related changes, including schema updates, configuration changes, and index rebuilds.
- Plan, test, and execute Solr Cloud upgrades, ensuring compatibility with SAP Commerce Cloud releases.
- Define rollback and risk mitigation strategies for search-related deployments.
- Participate in major platform upgrades and environment refreshes impacting search.
Cross‑Functional Collaboration
- Act as the search Subject Matter Expert (SME) across engineering, architecture, and operations teams.
- Provide guidance to developers on search design patterns and best practices.
- Support production incidents related to search and lead root cause analysis.
- Contribute to long-term search and platform architecture decisions.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience administering Apache Solr, including Solr Cloud in production environments.
- Strong hands-on experience with SAP Commerce Cloud (Hybris) search architecture.
- Deep understanding of:
- Solr schema design
- Indexing strategies
- Query parsing and optimization
- Faceting, filtering, and boosting
- Proven experience supporting high‑traffic, large‑scale eCommerce search platforms.
- Strong experience with Impexes and SAP Commerce data modeling.
- Experience planning and executing Solr upgrades.
- Solid Linux and JVM tuning experience.
- Strong troubleshooting, analytical, and communication skills.
Nice‑to‑Have
- Experience with cloud‑based or managed Solr deployments.
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and automated search deployments.
- Experience integrating search analytics with BI or reporting tools.
- Background in eCommerce merchandising or relevance tuning.
What Success Looks Like
- Search platform is stable, performant, and scalable.
- Search relevance and accuracy measurably improve over time.
- Business teams have clear, actionable visibility into search behavior.
- Search-related changes and upgrades are delivered safely and predictably.
- The role is recognized as the trusted owner of search across the organization.
#YourFuture
Job Types: Full-time, Permanent
Pay: From $100,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Dental care
- Employee assistance program
- Extended health care
- Life insurance
- On-site parking
- Paid time off
- RRSP match
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Kirkland, QC H9H 3L1
