Staff Software Engineer Search Quality
Databricks is a data and AI platform that lets organizations build analytics, AI agents, and applications on a unified, governed lakehouse.
Maintainer signals as of 9/23/2026
Funding history
Investors
About Databricks
Data engineers, analysts, and AI teams use Databricks to process large datasets, build reliable pipelines, and train models on a single governed platform. Users can run SQL analytics, serve ML predictions in real time, and deploy AI agents grounded in enterprise data. Its open lakehouse architecture provides consistent security and governance across analytical and operational workloads.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will set the technical direction for search quality. You will build ranking and reranking models, evaluation systems, and low-latency services, lead retrieval initiatives from prototype through rollout, and mentor engineers in search and ML engineering.
Requirements
- 10+ years building large-scale search, ranking, recommendation, or ML-driven relevance systems
- Expertise in search quality, ranking models, signals, query understanding, and evaluation methodologies
- Understanding of relevance metrics and evaluation frameworks
- Familiarity with vector search, keyword search, hybrid retrieval, and embedding-based semantic retrieval
- Knowledge of algorithms, data structures, and system design for ranking and retrieval systems
- Ability to deliver high-impact technical initiatives
- Communication and cross-functional collaboration skills
- Experience mentoring engineers
Responsibilities
- Lead the technical vision for search quality, ranking architecture, relevance modeling, and evaluation systems
- Solve ranking, query-understanding, and hybrid-retrieval challenges
- Design and train production ranking and reranking models
- Define metrics, evaluation methodologies, and experimentation strategies
- Drive engineering efforts from prototyping through production rollout
- Build and operate low-latency ranking, evaluation, and relevance-processing services
- Mentor engineers and raise engineering and scientific standards
- Shape the long-term roadmap for retrieval quality and ranking infrastructure
Benefits
- Annual performance bonus
- Equity