Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Vector Search

RDQ426R221

At Databricks we are passionate about enabling data teams to solve the worlds 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 worlds best data and AI infrastructure platform so our customers can use deep data insights to improve their business. Founded by engineers and customer obsessed we leap at every opportunity to tackle technical challenges from designing next-gen UI/UX for interfacing with data to scaling our services and infrastructure across millions of virtual machines. And were only getting started.

Our Vector Search technology is at the heart of this mission enabling developers to build a wide spectrum of AI applications from Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and recommendations to matching systems and product search experiences. It supports scalable similarity search across diverse datasets including structured semi-structured and unstructured content such as PDFs Office documents and wikis. This flexibility has made Vector Search our fastest-growing product fueled by the rapid adoption of Generative AI across industries.

As a Senior Staff Engineer youll play a critical role in scaling the foundation of our Vector Search product by designing and evolving distributed systems that serve as the backbone of real-time AI-powered applications. Youll shape the architectural direction drive innovation that unlocks previously infeasible capabilities and ensure the platform achieves exceptional performance scalability and reliability. Beyond hands-on contributions youll help define the long-term vision mentor senior engineers collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders and lead strategic efforts that create outsized technical and business impact.

The impact you will have:

• Drive the architecture and evolution of the Vector Search engine delivering capabilities that support scalable low-latency search and retrieval across massive multimodal datasets.
• Identify and solve key challenges in indexing query execution storage and ranking combining innovations in vector search with traditional information retrieval and database techniques.
• Partner with infrastructure product and research teams to shape APIs and developer workflows that make it easy to build and deploy production-grade AI-powered applications.
• Lead critical engineering efforts from whiteboard design to production rollout ensuring high standards for performance correctness and system resilience.
• Make direct high-impact contributions to production systems from designing core components to writing performant maintainable code that powers search and retrieval at scale.
• Champion software engineering best practices and help raise the technical bar across the organization through mentorship design reviews and collaboration.
• Contribute to long-range planning and influence company-wide technical direction in search AI infrastructure and data systems.

What we look for:

• 15 years of industry experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in Search Engines (vector and/or keyword-based) including areas such as indexing ranking retrieval infrastructure and query execution.
• Familiarity with storage systems and database internals.
• Strong foundation in algorithms data structures and system design especially as applied to real-world data processing and retrieval problems.
• Track record of driving high-impact technically complex initiatives that delivered clear customer or business value.
• Experience leading architecture efforts for performance-sensitive systems (e.g. latency-critical services multi-tenant platforms large-scale indexing pipelines).
• Strong communication skills and comfort operating in fast-moving cross-functional environments.
• A strategic mindset with the ability to align engineering execution with longer-term product and company goals.
• Passion for mentoring and developing other engineers.

Required Experience:

Staff IC