Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Vector Search

Posted:
5/13/2025, 4:56:07 AM

Location(s):
Catalonia, Spain

Experience Level(s):
Expert or higher ⋅ Senior

Field(s):
Software Engineering

Pay:
$401/hr or $834,080 total comp

RDQ426R221

At Databricks, we are passionate about enabling data teams to solve the world's 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 world's 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 we're only getting started.

Our Vector Search technology is at the heart of this mission, enabling developers to significantly enhance the accuracy of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and other generative AI applications. By facilitating similarity searches across a wide array of unstructured documents—including PDFs, Office documents, and Wikis—Vector Search has quickly become our fastest-growing product. This surge is fueled by the escalating demand for Generative AI capabilities among our customers. As a Senior Staff Engineer on the team, you'll play a critical role in shaping the architecture and scaling the core systems behind the Vector Search product to power AI applications designed for ease of use, scalability, and unparalleled performance.

The impact you will have: 

  • Solve real business needs at large scale by applying your software engineering.
  • Deliver a highly scalable, available, and fault-tolerant engine processing hundreds of TB of data daily across thousands of customers
  • Low level systems debugging, performance measurement & optimization on large production clusters.
  • Build architecture design, influence product roadmap, and take ownership and responsibility over new projects
  • Use your deep experience to help prevent and investigate production issues.
  • Plan and lead complicated technical projects that work with several teams within the company.
  • A strong influencer or driver in the organization’s roadmap and direction.
  • Lead a TLG or similar review committee, or initiate and sustain an org/eng-wide initiative driven by engineering needs.
  • Break down complex problems quickly into potential solutions, knowns, and unknowns, and de-risk (through prototyping/validation).
  • Contribute as a Technical Team Lead by mentoring others, lead sprint planning, delegating work and assignments to team members and participate in project planning.

What we look for:

  • 15+ years industry experience building and supporting large-scale distributed systems.
  • Comfortable working towards a multi-year vision with incremental deliverables.
  • Motivated by delivering customer value and impact.
  • Strong foundation in algorithms and data structures and their real-world use cases.
  • Experience driving company initiatives towards customer satisfaction.

About Databricks

Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 10,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, Grammarly, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify and democratize data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow. To learn more, follow Databricks on TwitterLinkedIn and Facebook.

Benefits

At Databricks, we strive to provide comprehensive benefits and perks that meet the needs of all of our employees. For specific details on the benefits offered in your region, please visit https://www.mybenefitsnow.com/databricks

Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

At Databricks, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can excel. We take great care to ensure that our hiring practices are inclusive and meet equal employment opportunity standards. Individuals looking for employment at Databricks are considered without regard to age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other protected characteristics.

Compliance

If access to export-controlled technology or source code is required for performance of job duties, it is within Employer's discretion whether to apply for a U.S. government license for such positions, and Employer may decline to proceed with an applicant on this basis alone.

Databricks

Website: https://databricks.com/

Headquarter Location: San Francisco, California, United States

Employee Count: 5001-10000

Year Founded: 2013

IPO Status: Private

Last Funding Type: Series I

Industries: Analytics ⋅ Artificial Intelligence (AI) ⋅ Information Technology ⋅ Machine Learning