Relevance Engineer – Enterprise Search & AI North Carolina Hybrid
About The Position
Join Cisco’s Enterprise Search team, responsible for powering intelligent knowledge discovery across the company. Our mission is to deliver highly relevant, scalable, and AI-enhanced search experiences that help employees and customers quickly find the information they need. We combine deep expertise in search infrastructure, ranking science, and distributed systems with modern Generative AI capabilities to transform traditional information retrieval into intelligent, context-aware discovery. We are a collaborative team of search engineers, data scientists, and AI practitioners who value experimentation, measurable impact, and technical excellence. What makes this team exciting is the opportunity to shape the future of enterprise search by integrating traditional information retrieval with cutting-edge AI and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agentic frameworks at scale.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Retrieval, Data Science, or related field with 5+ years of experience in search engineering or relevance optimization.
- 3+ years of hands-on experience designing and operating Elasticsearch in production environments.
- Demonstrated experience tuning search relevance (ranking, scoring models, analyzers, tokenization, synonyms, boosting).
- Experience working with large-scale structured and unstructured data sets.
- Proficiency in Python, Java, or similar programming language for search and data processing applications.
Nice To Haves
- Experience integrating Generative AI or LLM-based systems with search platforms.
- Familiarity with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks and vector search techniques.
- Experience with hybrid search (keyword + vector search) and embedding-based retrieval systems.
- Knowledge of evaluation metrics such as NDCG, MRR, precision/recall, and A/B testing for search optimization.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to translate search relevance improvements into business impact.
Responsibilities
- Architect and optimize hybrid retrieval systems leveraging Elasticsearch, semantic embeddings, and re-ranking models to improve top-k relevance, latency, and downstream Generative AI response quality.
- Develop and tune relevance models using query analytics, behavioral signals, and experimentation frameworks to improve search outcomes.
- Integrate Generative AI capabilities with traditional information retrieval systems to create intelligent, context-aware search experiences.
- Implement and optimize Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines that combine structured and unstructured enterprise data sources.
- Partner with AI engineers, platform teams, and product stakeholders to define measurable improvements in search quality and user satisfaction.
Benefits
- medical, dental and vision insurance
- a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
- paid parental leave
- short and long-term disability coverage
- basic life insurance
- 10 paid holidays per full calendar year
- 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
- 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday
- paid year-end holiday shutdown
- 4 paid days off for personal wellness
- 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year (non-exempt)
- flexible vacation time off program (exempt)
- 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter
- up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next
- Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer
- annual bonuses (for non-sales roles)
- performance-based incentive pay (for sales roles)
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
