Enterprise Search Tech Lead

Job Description:

Collaborate with Innovative 3Mers Around the World

Choosing where to start and grow your career has a major impact on your professional and personal life, so it’s equally important you know that the company that you choose to work at, and its leaders, will support and guide you. With a wide variety of people, global locations, technologies and products, 3M is a place where you can collaborate with other curious, creative 3Mers.

This position provides an opportunity to transition from other private, public, government or military experience to a 3M career

The Impact You’ll Make in this Role

As the Enterprise Search Tech Lead (Software Engineer), you will lead the design, development, and optimization of 3M’s enterprise search platform, driving scalable, high-performance search capabilities that support digital experiences and emerging AI applications. This role owns the end-to-end search ecosystem, including ingestion pipelines, search APIs, index architecture, cloud infrastructure, and platform reliability. You will play a key role in advancing search capabilities through hybrid retrieval approaches that combine traditional and semantic search to enable RAG, LLM, and agentic AI use cases.

As an enterprise search tech lead, you will have the opportunity to tap into your curiosity and collaborate with some of the most innovative people around the world. Here, you will make an impact by:

• Leading design, development, and optimization of enterprise search solutions built on AWS OpenSearch to improve relevance, scalability, and AI-readiness across digital platforms.
• Owning technical decisions across the full search stack: ingestion pipelines (Spring Boot/Batch, Kafka), search APIs, index design, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Driving platform evolution toward hybrid retrieval (lexical + semantic/vector search) to support RAG, LLM grounding, and agentic AI use cases.
• Creating and maintaining comprehensive technical documentation including C4 architecture models, system design diagrams, and operational runbooks.
• Mentoring and leading developers on the search engineering team, conducting code reviews, and raising engineering standards.
• Partnering with the domain architect on long-term strategy while independently executing complex platform changes.
• Building and maintaining Airflow-orchestrated ingestion workflows, monitoring/alerting systems, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Supporting cross-functional teams by troubleshooting search issues, monitoring system health, and partnering with consuming applications (product navigator, digital commerce, AI assistants).
• Willingness to be on-call in the event of critical issues requiring timely resolution.

Your Skills and Expertise 
To set you up for success in this role from day one, 3M requires (at a minimum) the following qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, information systems, or Technology field (completed and verified prior to start).
• Five (5) years of search-related development experience in a private, public, government, or military environment.
• Seven (7) years of overall software engineering experience in a private, public, government or military environment

Additional qualifications that could help you succeed even further in this role include:

• Experience with AWS OpenSearch/Elasticsearch: index design, analyzers/tokenizers, synonyms, aggregations, relevance tuning, and performance optimization.
• Experience with Java 17+, Spring Boot, Spring Batch, and multi-module Maven projects.
• Experience with Kafka/MSK messaging — producers, consumers, and stream processing.
• Experience with AWS services (S3, IAM, Lambda, MSK, ECS, CloudWatch, EFS).
• Strong understanding of search fundamentals (BM25, relevance tuning, autocomplete, vector search).
• Experience with embeddings, vector databases, or RAG pipelines for LLM applications.
• Experience building and operating Airflow DAGs for data pipeline orchestration.
• Experience modernizing legacy search platforms or migrating between search engine versions.
• Familiarity with search analytics, A/B testing for ranking, and relevance measurement (NDCG, MRR)
• Demonstrated ability to document complex systems — C4 model, architecture decision records, or equivalent.

Work location:

• Work location: Maplewood, MN or Austin, Texas

Travel: May include up to 10% domestic/international

Relocation: Not Authorized

Must be legally authorized to work in country of employment without sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., H1B status).

Supporting Your Well-being

3M offers many programs to help you live your best life – both physically and financially. To ensure competitive pay and benefits, 3M regularly benchmarks with other companies that are comparable in size and scope.

Chat with Max

For assistance with searching through our current job openings or for more information about all things 3M, visit Max, our virtual recruiting assistant on 3M.com/careers.

Applicable to US Applicants Only:The expected compensation range for this position is $145,676 - $178,049, which includes base pay plus variable incentive pay, if eligible. This range represents a good faith estimate for this position. The specific compensation offered to a candidate may vary based on factors including, but not limited to, the candidate’s relevant knowledge, training, skills, work location, and/or experience. In addition, this position may be eligible for a range of benefits (e.g., Medical, Dental & Vision, Health Savings Accounts, Health Care & Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts, Disability Benefits, Life Insurance, Voluntary Benefits, Paid Absences and Retirement Benefits, etc.). Additional information is available at: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/careers-us/working-at-3m/benefits/.

Good Faith Posting Date Range 07/07/2026 To 08/06/2026 Or until filled

All US-based 3M full time employees will need to sign an employee agreement as a condition of employment with 3M. This agreement lays out key terms on using 3M Confidential Information and Trade Secrets. It also has provisions discussing conflicts of interest and how inventions are assigned. Employees that are Job Grade 7 or equivalent and above may also have obligations to not compete against 3M or solicit its employees or customers, both during their employment, and for a period after they leave 3M.

Learn more about 3M’s creative solutions to the world’s problems at www.3M.com or on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn @3M.

Responsibilities of this position include that corporate policies, procedures and security standards are complied with while performing assigned duties.

Safety is a core value at 3M. All employees are expected to contribute to a strong Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) culture by following safety policies, identifying hazards, and engaging in continuous improvement.

Pay & Benefits Overview: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/careers-us/working-at-3m/benefits/

3M does not discriminate in hiring or employment on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, religion, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Please note: your application may not be considered if you do not provide your education and work history, either by: 1) uploading a resume, or 2) entering the information into the application fields directly.

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