Databricks
Staff Software Engineer, Search Quality
$165K–$220K
Mountain View, California +1 · Staff · Full-time · Posted Nov 17, 2025
- Location
- Mountain View, California
San Francisco, California - Experience
- 10+ years.
About the job
Sets technical direction and builds ranking, relevance, and evaluation systems to improve search quality across Databricks’ retrieval products.
What you'll do
- Lead the architecture and technical vision for search ranking, relevance modeling, and evaluation.
- Design, train, and deploy ranking and reranking models and resilient, low-latency services; measure and improve retrieval quality.
- Partner across research, product, and infrastructure teams, lead strategic initiatives, and mentor engineers.
What they ask 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.
- Solid foundation in algorithms, data structures, and system design for performance-critical ranking and retrieval systems.
Nice to have
- Familiarity with vector search, keyword search, hybrid retrieval, and embedding-based semantic retrieval.
Pay
$165,300 — $219,675 USD (base salary)
Tools
vector search, keyword search, hybrid retrieval, embedding-based semantic retrieval
AI focus
Builds and improves retrieval and ranking systems for AI applications, including RAG, AI assistants, and recommendation systems.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative