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Role Description

At Ontrac Solutions, we partner with elite engineering organizations to build systems that operate at planetary scale. Our client, a founding search company, is evolving the foundation of its core search platform — and we are looking for a Principal Python Engineer who does not just use Python… but understands it at its core execution model.

This is not a feature role. This is not application engineering. This is infrastructure that shapes user experience at massive scale.

The Mandate

• Design and optimize the Python systems that power:
• Global indexing pipelines
• Real-time search services
• Ranking and relevance models
• High-QPS distributed APIs
• ML-integrated search architecture

You will operate where performance, scale, and precision intersect.

The Environment You'll Influence

• You'll work alongside teams leveraging:
• Apache Lucene
• Elasticsearch
• Apache Solr
• Apache Kafka
• Hadoop
• TensorFlow
• PyTorch

This is distributed systems engineering at scale. Latency matters. Throughput matters. Architecture matters.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of Python engineering in production
• Understands CPython internals and performance trade-offs
• Optimized systems around GIL, async I/O, multiprocessing
• Built high-throughput services serving millions of users
• Architected distributed systems end-to-end
• Debugged performance issues at memory and execution level
• Operated at Staff or Principal level with architectural ownership

Requirements

• Architect low-latency Python services supporting core search
• Optimize indexing and ranking pipelines
• Improve query response times at scale
• Design concurrency strategies for performance-critical systems
• Influence system-level architectural decisions
• Mentor senior engineers and elevate technical standards
• Bridge ML-driven ranking systems with production-grade infrastructure

The Impact

Your work will:

• Directly influence millions of search queries
• Reduce latency across global systems
• Increase relevance accuracy
• Improve infrastructure resiliency
• Shape the evolution of Yahoo's search architecture

This is high-visibility, high-impact engineering.

What Makes This Opportunity Different

Through Ontrac Solutions, you're not just stepping into a contract role. You're joining a performance-driven engineering ecosystem. We operate with:

• Enterprise precision
• Architectural rigor
• Clear executive alignment
• Outcome-driven delivery

We partner with organizations where technical excellence is not optional — it's foundational.

Ideal Background

• Built large-scale search platforms
• Worked on marketplace or ad-tech systems
• Led distributed systems architecture
• Contributed to open-source Python libraries
• Operated in environments where uptime > 99.9% is mandatory
• Experience in relevance engineering, information retrieval theory, or ML-driven search pipelines is highly valued.

Why This Role Is Elite

This is not CRUD engineering. This is not startup experimentation. This is not maintenance work. This is:

• Distributed systems at scale
• Performance-critical Python engineering
• Search infrastructure modernization
• Architecture with real global impact