Staff Software Engineer- Search Quality

P-1408

The Mission

We are democratizing Data and AI for every enterprise user. Our vision is a world where anyone can master their organization’s data through Apps and AI Agents. We are building the retrieval backbone for two worlds: the high-precision context layer for AI agents and the intuitive search experience for people goal is the same: instant, accurate, and actionable insight.

The Role:

• As a Search Quality Engineer, you sit at the heart of this transformation. You aren't just building a search engine; you are building the contextual backbone of the entire company.
• You will own the quality of results for two distinct but deeply connected "users":
• The AI Agent: Optimizing the retrieval layer that allows LLMs to reason over data they weren’t trained on, ensuring they have the "ground truth" needed to synthesize accurate, high-stakes business actions.
• The Human User: Improving the traditional search experience so employees can find assets and answers through intuitive, high-recall interfaces.

The Technical Challenge

This isn't a solved problem. You will be tackling "Search" in its most evolved form:

• Hybrid Retrieval: Balancing traditional keyword-based search (for exactness) with semantic vector search (for intent).
• Dual-Optimization: Fine-tuning ranking models that satisfy both human readability and LLM-ready context.
• High-Stakes Accuracy: In a world of Agents, poor search quality leads to hallucinations. You will build the guardrails and relevance scoring that ensure our AI stays grounded in reality.
• Data Heterogeneity: Connecting the dots across structured SQL tables, unstructured docs, and real-time business metrics.

Why This is the Place to Be

• You will have a front-row seat to the Agentic revolution. If you want to solve the hardest problems in data discovery and see your work power the decision-making of thousands of people, let’s talk.

What We’re Looking For

• The IR Specialist: You know your way around Lucene/Elasticsearch, embeddings, and ranking algorithms.
• The Quality and Metrics Obsessive: You understand that "relevance" is subjective and love building evaluation frameworks (human-in-the-loop and LLM-based) to measure it. You are obsessed with relevance metrics (nDCG, MRR, Precision@K).
• The Bridge Builder: You’re excited to apply traditional Information Retrieval (IR) wisdom to the cutting-edge world of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).

About Databricks

Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 20,000 organizations worldwide — in