Rauf Aliev
Solution Architect · E-Commerce & SAP Commerce Cloud · Search & Information Retrieval
r.aliev@gmail.com | +1 571 342 84 92
I'm a Solution Architect and hands-on engineer: building software since 2001, working in e-commerce that entire time, and specializing in SAP Commerce Cloud (Hybris) since 2013. Large-scale commerce architecture is the center of gravity of my career — from discovery and target-state design to migrations, performance engineering, and writing the code myself. Alongside that, search and information retrieval have been a long-standing specialty, and the two reinforce each other constantly in real commerce systems. I'm the author of four books and 200+ technical articles, and I build things constantly — usually because figuring it out is the point.
Core Expertise
- SAP Commerce Cloud / Hybris (13+ years): on-prem and CCv2 (cloud-native, AWS/Kubernetes). Full lifecycle — architecture, development, migration, performance, and support — including work well below the documented API surface (persistence layer, ServiceLayer, FlexibleSearch internals, type system, caching, clustering).
- E-Commerce & Commerce Architecture: B2B and B2C, catalogs up to tens of millions of SKUs; cart/checkout, pricing and promotions, OMS and inventory, omnichannel, integrations (SAP ERP, CPI/Data Hub, OCC, SSO, tax, CMS).
- Search & Information Retrieval: Apache Solr/Lucene (deep internals), Coveo, Elasticsearch; relevance and ranking, learning-to-rank, hybrid retrieval, query understanding, and rigorous offline evaluation (nDCG, MAP, MRR).
- AI / ML (applied): RAG from scratch, embeddings and vector search, recommender systems (classic → deep learning → LLM), and LLM-in-the-loop tooling for search evaluation and content work.
- Cloud, DevOps & performance: AWS, Kubernetes/Docker, microservices, CI/build systems, caching strategies, and deep bottleneck analysis.
Selected Clients
Chief Software Engineer II / Solution Architect at EPAM Systems (10+ years). Projects where I worked as Solution Architect, from a few months to several years:
- Mercedes-Benz USA — SAP Commerce (on-prem) + Spring Boot microservices on AWS/Kubernetes; major platform migration, E2E testing and observability tooling.
- Grainger — discovery and reverse-engineering of a large commerce codebase; SAP Commerce → AWS transformation proposal.
- SAP SE — Coveo integration with internal services and AI search (RAG).
- Estée Lauder — SAP ERP integration and large-scale personalized search design.
- Abcam — search optimization, smart autocomplete, and real-time entity recognition.
- Schlumberger (SLB) — Python pricing-calculation framework and search work.
- Amway — storefront, automated CMS migration tooling, and performance engineering.
- Ahold Delhaize — to-be microservices architecture and search analytics.
- Medline, Majid Al Futtaim, Philip Morris (ZYN) — commerce and search architecture, discovery, and performance engagements.
Projects
Author, Hybrismart.com
A leading engineering blog on SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly SAP Hybris), e-commerce architecture, and search — covering platform internals, data management, performance, integrations, and developer tooling. I've written more than 200 in-depth articles there (nearly 100% of the blog's content).
Founder & Chief Architect, TestMySearch.com
An engine-agnostic platform for search-quality analysis and optimization: run thousands of queries against multiple backends (Solr, Elasticsearch, and others) in offline batches, compute a wide array of IR metrics, and use an LLM-based "Virtual Search Assessor" to judge relevance and generate test queries.
Authored Books
Four books spanning e-commerce search architecture, search internals, multilingual search, and recommender systems.
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Anatomy of eCommerce Search
A practical, end-to-end blueprint for search engineers and architects — query understanding, hybrid retrieval, Learning to Rank (LTR), and product understanding.
Available on Amazon -
Inside Apache Solr and Lucene
An in-depth exploration of the internal algorithms and data structures that power Apache Solr and Lucene.
Amazon · Barnes & Noble · Apple Books -
Beyond English: Architecting Search for a Global World
A comprehensive guide to building multilingual and cross-lingual search, from language-specific text analysis to cross-lingual retrieval strategies.
Available on Amazon -
Recommender Algorithms
A hands-on guide to the design, implementation, and evaluation of modern recommender systems.
Amazon · Barnes & Noble
Writing & Speaking
- 200+ technical articles on hybrismart.com, spanning architecture, e-commerce, search, integrations, performance, data migration, and AI/ML.
- Paper: "Improving E-commerce Search with Category-Aligned Retrieval" — trainable category prototypes and LLMs for query-category alignment.
- Paper: "BloomSpan: Memory-Efficient Maximal Frequent Substring Mining for Large-Scale Text".
- Frequent speaker at EPAM Technology Excellence Initiative and SAP CX community webinars — SAP Commerce internals, Solr/Lucene, e-commerce search, recommender algorithms, and Coveo.