Staff Software Engineer, Search Quality
Databricks11 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 builds a cloud-based data and AI platform centered on the lakehouse architecture, combining data engineering, analytics, and machine learning with Apache Spark, Delta Lake, and MLflow. It sells subscriptions and cloud services to enterprises that need to unify data pipelines and develop large-scale AI and analytics. Founded in 2013 by the creators of Apache Spark and headquartered in San Francisco, the company is privately held and serves organizations across many industries.