Staff Software Engineer, Search Quality
Databricks9 months ago
Base Salary
$165k - $220k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead the technical vision for Search Quality, including ranking architecture, relevance modeling, and evaluation systems.
- Solve ranking, query understanding, and hybrid retrieval challenges across vector, keyword, and multimodal search.
- Design and train production-ready ranking and reranking models optimized for quality, latency, and resource efficiency.
- Define metrics, evaluation methodologies, and experimentation strategies with research, product, and infrastructure teams.
- Drive engineering efforts from prototyping through production rollout and measurable relevance improvements.
- Build and operate resilient, low-latency services for ranking, evaluation, and relevance signal processing.
- Mentor teammates and elevate design, code quality, scientific rigor, and ML and search engineering practices.
- Shape the long-term roadmap for retrieval quality, ranking infrastructure, and retrieval-driven AI products.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience building large-scale search, ranking, recommendation, or ML-driven relevance systems.
- Deep expertise in Search Quality, including ranking models, signals, query understanding, and evaluation methodologies.
- Strong understanding of relevance metrics and evaluation frameworks.
- Familiarity with vector search, keyword search, hybrid retrieval, and embedding-based semantic retrieval.
- Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and system design for performance-critical ranking and retrieval systems.
- Proven ability to deliver high-impact technical initiatives with measurable business or product outcomes.
- Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.
- Strategic, product-oriented mindset aligned with long-term technical vision.
- Passion for mentoring engineers and fostering technical excellence.
Benefits
- Comprehensive benefits and perks, with region-specific details available through Databricks’ benefits portal.
Tech Stack
Apache SparkMLflow
Categories
About Databricks
Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 20,000 organizations worldwide — including adidas, AT&T, Bayer, Block, Mastercard, Rivian, Unilever, and over 60% of the Fortune 500 — rely on Databricks to build and scale data and AI apps, analytics and agents. Headquartered in San Francisco with 30+ offices around the globe, Databricks offers a unified Data Intelligence Platform that includes Agent Bricks, Lakeflow, Lakehouse, Lakebase and Unity Catalog. --- Databricks applicants Please apply through our official Careers page at databricks.com/company/careers. All official communication from Databricks will come from email addresses ending with @databricks.com or @goodtime.io (our meeting tool).