About this role
About the Role As Staff Software Engineer for Search Quality, you will help define and execute the technical direction for ranking, relevance, evaluation, and quality initiatives across Databricks’ next-generation Search product.
What You'll Do
- Lead the technical vision for Search Quality, shaping the ranking architecture, relevance modeling stack, and evaluation systems that power Databricks’ retrieval experiences.
- Identify and solve challenges in ranking, query understanding, and hybrid retrieval — advancing 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 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're Looking 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.
Compensation & Benefits
- Local Pay Range $165,300—$219,675 USD
- The total compensation package may include annual performance bonus, equity, and benefits listed above.
- For more information regarding which range your location is in, visit the Databricks careers page. Databricks provides comprehensive benefits and perks; details vary by region and role.