Staff Software Engineer, Search

P-150 At Databricks, we are passionate about enabling data teams to solve the world's toughest problems — from making the next mode of transportation a reality to accelerating the development of medical breakthroughs. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform so our customers can use deep data insights to improve their business. Search plays a foundational role in this mission. Whether through keyword-based retrieval, semantic similarity via vector embeddings, or hybrid approaches that combine both, our Search technologies help customers find, discover, and understand information across massive, complex datasets. These capabilities power everything from Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), AI assistants, and recommendation systems to enterprise knowledge management, in-product search, and data exploration. 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. You’ll work across research, product, and infra to push the frontier of retrieval quality for enterprise AI applications — blending traditional information retrieval techniques, representation learning, and neural ranking. Beyond hands-on contributions, you will help define our long-term vision for relevance and quality, mentor senior engineers, and lead strategic efforts that raise the accuracy, reliability, and product impact of Search across Databricks. Check out our recent blog post: Reranking in Databricks AI Search for Faster, Smarter Retrieval in RAG Agents The impact you will have: Lead the technical vision for Search Quality, shaping the ranking architecture, relevance modeling stack, and evaluation systems that power Datab

At Affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most. As we build Affirm's advertising platform and evolve Marketplace into a best in class shopping destination, the ability to route and discover is one of the greatest levers for consumer experiences. Search is one of the highest impact surfaces, and we are building a new team that will own not just the recommendations and search experiences, but also explore opportunities to improve customer experience, monetization, and merchant value. This team will help make Affirm the definitive destination consumers turn to for discovery, understanding, comparing, and shopping through Affirm, and will also lay the foundation for an agentic platform. What You'll Do · You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects. · You will collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed. · You will act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes. · You take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts. · You will foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks. · You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example. What We Look For · You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and laun

RDQ427R351 At Databricks, we are passionate about enabling data teams to solve the world's toughest problems — from making the next mode of transportation a reality to accelerating the development of medical breakthroughs. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform so our customers can use deep data insights to improve their business. Search plays a foundational role in this mission. Whether through keyword-based retrieval, semantic similarity via vector embeddings, or hybrid approaches that combine both, our Search technologies help customers find, discover, and understand information across massive, complex datasets. These capabilities power everything from Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), AI assistants, and recommendation systems to enterprise knowledge management, in-product search, and data exploration. As a Staff Engineer for Search, you’ll play a critical role in building and scaling our next-generation Search product — spanning Vector Search, Keyword Search, and Search Quality. You’ll drive the design and evolution of a highly-performant, cost-efficient, and developer-friendly Search stack that enables customers to build AI applications with accuracy, speed, and scale. Beyond hands-on contributions, you’ll help define the long-term vision, mentor senior engineers, collaborate across teams, and lead strategic efforts that expand the technical and business impact of Search at Databricks. Check out our recent blog post: Decoupled by Design: Billion-Scale AI Search The impact you will have: Drive the architecture and evolution of the Search product, delivering scalable, low-latency, and high-quality retrieval across massive multimodal datasets. Identify and solve challenges in indexing, storage, query execution, and ranking — blending innovations in vector search, keyword search, and hybrid retrieval techniques. Partner with infrastructure, product, and research teams to shape APIs and developer experiences that

At Affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most. As we build Affirm's advertising platform and evolve Marketplace into a best in class shopping destination, the ability to route and discover is one of the greatest levers for consumer experiences. Search is one of the highest impact surfaces, and we are building a new team that will own not just the recommendations and search experiences, but also explore opportunities to improve customer experience, monetization, and merchant value. This team will help make Affirm the definitive destination consumers turn to for discovery, understanding, comparing, and shopping through Affirm, and will also lay the foundation for an agentic platform. What You'll Do · You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects. · You will collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed. · You will act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes. · You take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts. · You will foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks. · You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example. What We Look For · You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and laun

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. The Cortex team is building the future of AI for enterprise data. This role focuses on the Search infrastructure that powers our flagship products like CoWork, Cortex Code & Cortex Agents fast, reliable, scalable and secure at the enterprise level. You will be building high-performance retrieval engines (leveraging vector search, hybrid search, and semantic indexing) that power Snowflake Cortex. This involves optimizing how billions of rows of data are indexed and retrieved in milliseconds. What you will do in this role: Architect Agentic Runtimes: Build and scale the orchestration engines that execute complex agentic workflows, ensuring low-latency tool execution and robust state management. Scale Context Engineering Infra: Design high-performance systems for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), including vector database integration, scalable and efficient search indexing, query processing, and result ranking, semantic caching, and automated metadata extraction. Build the "Evals Engine": Develop the automated infrastructure required to run massive-scale golden set simulations, error analysis pipelines, and "hillclimbing" experiments. Productionize AI Workflows: Collaborate with the modeling team to take raw LLM capabilities and turn them into hardened, multi-tenant mi

P-1408 The Applied AI team at Databricks sits at the forefront of advancing AI/ML-powered products . Databricks’ customers are continuously creating new assets (tables, notebooks, dashboards, datarooms, pipelines, sql queries, ml models etc.) on the platform. Some of them can have hundreds of millions of assets. Finding an asset is a critical user journey for Databricks’ customers which helps them accomplish their tasks. As our Search product continues to evolve, we are seeking a Staff Engineer to lead enhancements to our Search Quality. In 2025, we will focus on enhancing search ranking, improving query understanding, building robust evals and growing the coverage of assets to enable seamless search at scale. Key Responsibilities Drive the development and deployment of ML based search and discovery relevance models and systems integrated with Databricks' products and services. Design and implement automated ML and NLP pipelines for data preprocessing, query understanding and rewrite, ranking and retrieval, and model evaluation, enabling rapid experimentation and iteration. Collaborate with product managers and cross-functional teams to drive technology-first initiatives that enable novel business strategies and product roadmaps for the search and discovery experience. Contribute to building a robust framework for evaluating search ranking improvements - both offline and online. What We’re Looking For BS+ (M.S. or PhD preferred) in Computer Science, or a related field. 10+ years experience developing search relevance systems at scale in production or in high-impact research environments. Experience applying LLM to search relevance Experience in one or more of the following: Query understanding NLP Text mining Recommendations Personalization Discovery Conversational AI Strong understanding of computer science fundamentals. Contributions to well-used open-source projects. Why Join Us? At Databricks,