Staff Software Engineer – Search Ranking

About the role

The Applied AI team at Databricks is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead enhancements to search ranking and overall search quality. You will shape the way millions of assets are discovered across the platform, driving AI‑powered relevance at scale.

Key responsibilities

• Drive development and deployment of ML‑based search and discovery relevance models integrated with Databricks products.
• Design and implement automated ML and NLP pipelines for data preprocessing, query understanding, ranking, retrieval, and model evaluation.
• Collaborate with product managers and cross‑functional teams to enable novel business strategies and product roadmaps for search and discovery.
• Contribute to a robust framework for evaluating search ranking improvements both offline and online.

Required profile

• BS+ in Computer Science or related field (M.S. or PhD preferred).
• 10+ years experience building search relevance systems at scale in production or high‑impact research.
• Proven experience applying Large Language Models to search relevance.
• Strong computer‑science fundamentals and contributions to well‑used open‑source projects.

Required skills

• Machine Learning
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Large Language Models (LLM)
• Query understanding
• Text mining
• Recommendation systems
• Personalization
• Discovery
• Conversational AI