Databricks
Senior Staff Applied AI Engineer - Context Retrieval
$229K–$343K
Mountain View, California +1 · Senior Staff · Full-time · Posted May 7, 2026
- Location
- Mountain View, California
San Francisco, California - Experience
- 10+ years of software engineering experience; significant time building production retrieval, search, or RAG systems at scale.
About the job
Build and lead a greenfield retrieval stack and search subagents that provide relevant, evaluated context to Databricks agents across enterprise data and SaaS sources.
What you'll do
- Design and own query understanding, indexing, retrieval, ranking, and evaluation across structured and unstructured data.
- Build search subagents that plan searches, assess retrieval sufficiency, and ground results in evidence.
- Set technical direction, mentor engineers, and partner across Research, Product, and Platform.
What they ask for
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant work building production retrieval, search, or RAG systems at scale.
- Deep information retrieval expertise across lexical, dense, hybrid retrieval, and learning-to-rank.
- Hands-on experience with LLM-era retrieval, agentic systems, and relevance evaluation.
- Experience with structured and unstructured data, building 0→1 systems, and technical leadership.
Nice to have
- Experience with enterprise SaaS retrieval, including permissions, freshness, multi-tenancy, or ACL-aware indexing.
- Open-source or research contributions in IR/search, or experience training or fine-tuning embedding models, rerankers, or query understanding models.
Pay
$228,600 — $342,800 USD (base salary)
Tools
BM25, Lucene/Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, FAISS, ScaNN, HNSW, RAG, nDCG, MRR
AI focus
Build retrieval for LLM agents and search subagents, including query planning, iterative retrieval, sufficiency checks, grounding, and evaluation.
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