Search & Discovery Engineers
Need senior search expertise inside your team rather than behind an agency ticket queue? Stell Media's embedded search engineers join your standups, work your backlog and use your tooling to improve ecommerce site search, relevance and product findability. Placement takes about two weeks, and our wider site search & discovery practice backs every engineer.
The problem
Hiring a Search Specialist Takes Five Months You Do Not Have
Search and discovery engineering is a narrow market, and the people who are good at it are rarely looking. While you recruit, the relevance backlog grows, zero-result searches pile up and shoppers leave without finding what they came for.
Embedded placement puts a senior search engineer in your standups within a fortnight. You skip the recruitment and onboarding overhead, and our internal bench stands behind them for problems one person should not solve alone.
What You Get with Our Embedded Search Engineers
Every engagement includes the same four things.
Senior Search Operator, Embedded in Your Team
Your engineer works in your tools, your rituals and your backlog. They tune ranking rules, synonyms and query handling as part of your team, not as an outside vendor.
Bench Access for Niche Platform Problems
The engineer's whole practice is reachable behind them, so a tricky platform issue does not stall for a week. For product data issues that affect search quality, you can also add our embedded product data specialists.
Documented Handover from Day One
Everything they build is documented for your team from the start, on the assumption that the engagement will end. Your search capability stays with you.
Shared Goals, Not Utilisation Targets
They carry your team's metric, such as search conversion or zero-result rate, not a billable-hours target. We review progress with you every month.
How Embedded Placement Works, Week by Week
Match
We scope the gap and put forward two people with relevant platform history. You interview both and choose.
Embed
We set up access, tooling and rituals. Your engineer starts on real backlog, not a discovery phase.
First Shipped Work
We hold ourselves to a measurable improvement inside the first month.
Review
We review progress against your metric. You can change scope, person or finish at each review once the 3-month minimum is complete.
Stack we work in
Platform-agnostic. We work in whatever you already own and tell you honestly when it is the constraint.
Embedded Search Engineers: Frequently Asked Questions
It is augmentation with a practice behind it. Your engineer works as part of your team and has senior peers to escalate to, which a typical contractor does not.