Staff Software Engineer, AI Search
$166k - $225k • Remote • Mountain View, California
Posted 5d ago
Job Location
Mountain View, California
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
Databricks is seeking a Staff Engineer for AI Search to play a critical role in building and scaling their next-generation Search product, encompassing Vector Search, Keyword Search, and Search Quality. The role involves driving 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, the engineer will help define the long-term vision, mentor senior engineers, collaborate across teams, and lead strategic efforts to expand the technical and business impact of Search at Databricks.
Responsibilities
- 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 for AI-powered and search-driven applications.
- Lead end-to-end engineering efforts from design to production rollout, ensuring high standards for performance, correctness, and reliability.
- Make direct, high-impact contributions to core systems powering search, discovery, and recommendation experiences.
- Champion software engineering excellence and mentor other engineers through design reviews, technical discussions, and collaborative development.
- Contribute to long-term planning and influence Databricks’ technical direction in search, AI infrastructure, and data systems.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
- Deep expertise in Search technologies (vector, keyword, hybrid) and related domains such as indexing, ranking, retrieval infrastructure, and relevance optimization.
- Familiarity with storage systems, recommendation engines, and database internals.
- Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and system design as applied to large-scale retrieval and data systems.
- Proven ability to deliver technically complex, high-impact initiatives that create customer or business value.
- Experience leading architecture for performance-sensitive, large-scale systems.
- 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.
Benefits
- Eligibility for annual performance bonus
- Equity
- Health insurance
- Paid Time Off (PTO)