As a Staff Software Engineer for Search Quality, you will drive the technical direction of ranking, relevance, evaluation, and quality initiatives across Databricks' next-generation Search product. You'll design and build the systems, models, and evaluation frameworks that ensure our Search stack delivers accurate, high-quality results across diverse multimodal datasets and query patterns.

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.

XML job scraping automation by YubHub