Staff Software Engineer - Search Platform

About the role

The Search team at Databricks is at the forefront of AI/ML-powered products. Customers continuously create new assets—tables, notebooks, dashboards, pipelines, SQL queries, ML models, and more—on the platform. Finding these assets is a critical user journey. As the Search product evolves, Databricks is looking for a Staff Engineer to lead enhancements to Search Quality, focusing on ranking, query understanding, evaluation, and large-scale coverage.

Key responsibilities

• Drive development and deployment of machine-learning-based search and discovery relevance models integrated with Databricks products.
• Design and implement automated ML and NLP pipelines for data preprocessing, query rewriting, ranking, retrieval, and model evaluation to enable rapid experimentation.
• Collaborate with product managers and cross-functional teams to shape technology-first initiatives that support novel business strategies and product roadmaps for search and discovery.
• Contribute to building 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 of experience developing search relevance systems at scale in production or high-impact research environments.
• Experience applying large language models to search relevance.
• Experience in one or more areas such as query understanding, NLP, text mining, recommendations, personalization, discovery, or conversational AI.
• Strong understanding of computer-science fundamentals.
• Contributions to well-used open-source projects.