About Netcore Unbxd

Netcore Unbxd is an AI-powered product discovery platform recognized by Forrester and Gartner as the global leader in Commerce Search and Product Discovery, earning Leader status in Gartner's 2025 Magic Quadrant- for the second consecutive year. We're trusted by billion-dollar retailers like Unilever, Waitrose, Express, Puma, Signet, and Advance Auto Parts to power conversions and revenue through best-in-class product discovery and personalization. We're at the forefront of Agentic AI in commerce - building AI Shopping Assistants and Autonomous Merchandising Agents that redefine how shoppers find what they want.

Role Overview

We're looking for a Principal Architect to own the technical direction of Unbxd's Search, Recommendations, and AI Engineering Platform - the core system processing millions of API calls a day across a multi-tenant SaaS platform, under tight SLAs, for some of the world's largest retailers.

This is a senior individual-contributor role, not a people-management position. You'll be the deepest technical authority in the room: setting architecture strategy, making hard distributed-systems tradeoffs, and being hands-on enough to prototype, debug, and review code at the level of detail that actually moves the needle.

You'll also act as a technical advisor across adjacent areas of the platform - including the Merchandising Console and other supporting systems - helping ensure architectural coherence across Unbxd's broader product surface, even though your primary charter is search, recommendations, and the AI engineering platform.

Key Responsibilities

- Own and evolve the architecture of Unbxd's Search & Recommendations platform - a Solr-based system supporting millions of API calls/day at strict SLA targets for enterprise retail customers.

- Set the multi-year technical strategy for the AI Engineering Platform, including how vector search, embeddings, and LLM-based agentic components (AI Shopping Assistant, Autonomous Merchandising Agents) integrate with the core retrieval stack.

- Make and defend architectural decisions on scalability, fault tolerance, multi-tenancy, and cost-efficiency for a SaaS platform operating at retail scale (including peak-traffic events like flash sales and holiday spikes).

- Act as a technical advisor to adjacent teams (Merchandising Console, self-serve, delivery/CX platforms), ensuring their designs align with overall platform architecture, without owning their day-to-day delivery.

- Stay hands-on - write and review code, build proofs of concept for new architectural directions, and go deep on production issues when systemic root-causing is needed.

- Partner with engineering leadership, product management, and customer-facing teams to translate business and customer requirements (e.g., SLA commitments, billing model design, integration patterns for SIs/agencies) into sound technical architecture.

- Define technical standards, review architecture proposals across teams, and act as an escalation point for the hardest distributed-systems and reliability problems.

- Represent Unbxd's technical platform in customer-facing or partner-facing technical discussions where deep architectural credibility is required.

- Track and evaluate emerging technology (search, vector databases, agentic AI infra) and translate it into pragmatic recommendations for the platform roadmap.