2 days ago
Berlin, Germany +2 moreStaff+
Responsibilities
- Define and drive the search and retrieval strategy across hybrid BM25 and vector retrieval, reranking, query understanding, rewriting, chunking, and embeddings.
- Build and evolve ingestion, indexing, query, ranking, and AI-summary pipelines with source citations.
- Own search quality through evaluation tooling, golden query sets, relevance metrics, offline evaluations, and online signals.
- Ensure permission-aware retrieval, tenant isolation, multilingual handling, graceful degradation, and appropriate latency, quality, and cost trade-offs.
- Improve search observability through tracing, relevance dashboards, and debugging tools.
- Lead technical strategy, architecture, documentation, major technical decisions, and technical roadmaps.
- Collaborate with Product, Design, content, integrations, and Navigator teams to deliver measurable search improvements.
- Mentor and guide engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and experiment reviews while fostering technical excellence and ownership.
Requirements
- Proven track record as a Staff Engineer or Technical Lead with strong leadership and problem-solving skills.
- Production experience building search or retrieval systems with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Solr, or similar technologies, including relevance tuning, analyzers, and index design.
- Hands-on experience with vector or kNN search, hybrid fusion such as RRF, cross-encoder reranking, chunking, embeddings, and ideally RAG or LLM-grounded answers.
- Experience with relevance evaluation methods including recall, MRR, nDCG, golden sets, and LLM-as-judge with human checks.
- Strong understanding of multi-tenant architecture, permission-aware retrieval, security, and isolation in search.
- Experience designing latency-sensitive systems with budgets, timeouts, caching, fallbacks, and graceful degradation.
- Extensive backend experience with Kotlin, Java, or Go, plus comfort with React and TypeScript on the frontend.
- Knowledge of architecture and design patterns, long-term trade-off analysis, and technical decision-making.
- Strong communication skills and experience explaining relevance and ranking trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience working with Product and Design leaders in an Agile environment.
- Passion for high-quality software, diversity, inclusion, and fostering an environment where all voices are heard.
- Preferred experience includes multilingual search, query rewriting and expansion, typeahead, spell correction, prompt-injection and data-poisoning awareness in RAG systems, and LLM observability and evaluation tooling.
Benefits
- Competitive salary packages including an LTIP unit-based Long Term Incentive Plan.
- Flexible working time models and the option of hybrid work, supported by a yearly €1560 flex work allowance.
- 31 vacation days annually, including one floating holiday, plus pro rata fully paid Fridays off during August.
- Company pension scheme.
- One paid Volunteers Day per year for supporting a social project.
Categories
About Staffbase
Staffbase builds an employee communications and experience platform for enterprises to reach frontline and desk-based workers. Its SaaS suite includes a branded employee app, intranet, email and SMS tools, digital signage, and Microsoft 365/Teams integrations managed from a single console. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Chemnitz, Germany, it is privately held and serves customers such as Adidas, Alaska Airlines, Audi, and DHL.