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Staff Software Engineer, Search Quality

Databricks· Engineering
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Mountain View, CA$165.3k - $219.7kfull-timePosted 11mo ago

About the role

Staff Software Engineer for Search Quality at Databricks, responsible for technical direction of ranking, relevance, evaluation, and quality initiatives across the next-generation Search product, including systems, models, and evaluation frameworks to ensure accurate, high-quality results across multimodal datasets and query patterns.

Responsibilities

  • Lead the technical vision for Search Quality, shaping the ranking architecture, relevance modeling stack, and evaluation systems that power Databricks’ next-generation retrieval experiences.
  • Identify and solve challenges in ranking, query understanding, and hybrid retrieval — advancing state-of-the-art techniques in vector, keyword, and multimodal search.
  • Design and train production-ready ranking and reranking models with strong guarantees around quality, latency, and resource efficiency.
  • Partner closely with research, product, and infra teams to define metrics, evaluation methodologies, and experimentation strategies for new retrieval features and model architectures.
  • Drive end-to-end engineering efforts — from early prototyping to production rollout — ensuring correctness, reliability, and measurable improvements to relevance.
  • Build and operate resilient, low-latency services for ranking, evaluation, and relevance signal processing.
  • Champion excellence in ML and search engineering, mentoring teammates and elevating design, code quality, and scientific rigor across the team.
  • Shape Databricks’ long‑term roadmap for retrieval quality, ranking infrastructure, and the foundations for retrieval-driven AI products.

Qualifications

  • 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.
  • Solid foundation in algorithms, data structures, and system design for performance-critical ranking and retrieval systems.
  • Proven ability to deliver high-impact technical initiatives with clear business or product outcomes.
  • Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across teams in fast-moving environments.
  • Strategic and product-oriented mindset with the ability to align technical execution with long-term vision.
  • Passion for mentoring, growing engineers, and fostering technical excellence.

Skills

Required:Search QualityVector searchHybrid retrievalRanking modelsEvaluation frameworksCommunication

Benefits

  • For specific details on the benefits offered in your region click here.
Last updated Oct 15, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Databricks

Leading Data and AI Platform for Enterprises

Databricks offers a unified platform for data, analytics and AI. Build better AI with a data-centric approach. Simplify ETL, data warehousing, governance and AI on the Data Intelligence Platform.

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