Hire a search relevance engineer on contract
A senior engineer who has owned search quality at Walmart, Pinterest, Roblox and Shopify, working on your relevance problems with your team, and leaving behind the metrics to prove what changed.
A good fit if…
- Search is core to your product, and users search, don't find, and leave.
- You have engineers who can ship, but nobody who has owned relevance at scale.
- Ranking lives in hand-tuned boosts and synonym lists that nobody fully understands any more.
- You need results in weeks, not after a six-month search for a full-time hire.
Look elsewhere if…
- You need someone to stand up a search cluster from scratch: that's infrastructure work, not relevance.
- You want a full-time employee. I work on contract through my company.
- You have no query logs or user data at all yet. Relevance work needs real queries to learn from.
Deliverables your team keeps.
From brief to handover.
Read your query logs, catalog and current ranking. Agree what "better" means and how we'll measure it.
Build the evaluation set and baseline. Find the failure modes worth fixing first.
Fix the biggest failures in order of measured impact, with offline metrics before every A/B test.
Documentation, dashboards and a team that can keep improving relevance without me.
Works with what you run.
What I've built before.
How it's priced.
Not sure where to start? Most teams begin with a fixed-scope search relevance audit.
Starting prices; the final quote depends on scope and follows a free intro call.
Remote, working with teams in the US, UK and Europe. Async-first, with live time during your Pacific mornings, or your morning and early afternoon if you're in Europe. Contracted and invoiced in USD through Infersense Labs LLC (Wyoming, USA).
Questions buyers ask.
How is this different from hiring a full-time search engineer?
You get senior relevance experience in weeks instead of a months-long hiring process, without a permanent headcount. The goal is to leave your team able to own relevance after I hand over.
Do you work in our codebase?
Yes. I work in your repositories, with your engineers, and within your security and data-access requirements. I'm happy to sign an NDA.
Which search engines do you work with?
Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Vespa, Algolia and vector databases. The methods carry across engines; I only suggest a migration when the evaluation shows it pays off.
How do we know it worked?
Every engagement starts with an evaluation set and baseline metrics, so every change has a measured before and after, offline and in A/B tests.
Tell me what you're hiring for.
A free 30-minute call with me. You'll leave with a clear next step, and an honest answer on whether I'm the right person for it.