Staff Software Engineer, Search Quality

The impact you will have:

• 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.

What we look for:

• 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.