{"id":156327,"url":"https://alion.io/job/databricks-senior-staff-applied-ai-engineer-context-retrieval","title":"Senior Staff Applied AI Engineer - Context Retrieval","company":{"id":15,"name":"Databricks","domain":"databricks.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/databricks","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":79,"open_postings":858,"ghost_share":0.265,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0.001,"time_to_fill_p50_days":76,"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Mountain View, United States","San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":228600,"max":342800,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":342800},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"FAISS","optional":false},{"name":"Hallucination","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"OpenSearch","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Delta Lake","optional":true},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":true},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":true},{"name":"MLFlow","optional":true},{"name":"Spark","optional":true},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-05-07T21:02:48Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-21","last_verified_at":"2026-10-20T15:43:31Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":165,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":165},"description":"P-1549\nAt 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.\nThe Mission\nDatabricks agents are only as good as the context they can retrieve. Whether an agent is answering a question about last quarter's revenue, debugging a failing job, generating SQL against a 10,000-table lakehouse, or summarizing a Wiki page, its quality is bounded by what it can find - and how well it understands what it finds.\nWe are hiring a Senior Staff Applied AI Engineer to own context retrieval for Databricks agents across SaaS providers. This is a zero-to-one role with two deeply connected charters:\nBuild the retrieval stack - query understanding, content understanding, ranking, retrieval, and evaluation - across the Enterprise SaaS data stored across multiple systems.\nBuild the search subagents that sit on top of that stack and reason about what context is needed, how to retrieve it, and whether the right thing actually came back - closing the loop between an agent's intent and the substrate that serves it.\nIf you have deep Information Retrieval wisdom, have shipped retrieval systems for RAG and agentic workloads, and want to build the substrate - and the agents on top of it - that make every Databricks agent measurably smarter, this role is for you.\nWhat You Will Do\nBuild the full retrieval stack from scratch. Own the end-to-end system: query understanding, content understanding and indexing, hybrid retrieval, ranking, and evaluation. Make the architectural calls that will define how Databricks agents access context for years to come.\n Retrieve across heterogeneous data - structured and unstructured. Index and rank across structured assets (tables, columns, SQL queries, dashboards, code, notebooks, jobs) and unstructured content (docs, wikis, tickets, chat, images, video, audio). Each modality has its own signals - design retrieval that exploits them rather than flattens them.\nConnect to the SaaS surface area customers actually use. Build connectors and retrieval adapters for the systems where enterprise knowledge lives. Treat each retrieval source with its own freshness, permissions, and ranking signals.\n Optimize for two consumers at once. Retrieval must serve both LLMs (grounded, token-efficient, hallucination-resistant context) and humans (intuitive, explainable discovery). These are different objectives and require different signals - own both.\nCrack query understanding for agents. Agent queries don't look like web queries. Build query rewriting, decomposition, intent classification, and entity resolution tuned for multi-turn agentic workflows.\nCrack content understanding at scale. Build the pipelines that extract structure, entities, embeddings, summaries, and metadata from every supported asset type - and keep them fresh as customer data evolves.\n Build search subagents that reason about retrieval. Design the agentic layer that decides what context is needed, which sources to query, how to decompose and route the search, and - critically - whether the retrieved content is actually sufficient to answer the question. These subagents will plan multi-hop searches, issue follow-up queries when results are weak, ground claims against retrieved evidence, and hand back high-confidence context (or signal failure) to upstream agents. This is where IR meets agentic reasoning.\n Build the evaluation flywheel for both retrieval and subagents. Stand up offline evals (nDCG, MRR, Recall@K, Precision@K), LLM-as-judge harnesses, human-in-the-loop labeling, and online experimentation. Extend evaluation beyond ranking metrics to measure subagent decision quality - did it ask the right follow-up?, did it correctly recognize when retrieval failed?, did it ground its answer in the right evidence?. Quality you can't measure is quality you can't ship.\nSet technical direction and grow the team. Set the multi-year roadmap, mentor senior engineers, partner with Research, Product, and Platform leaders, and raise the technical bar across the org.\nWhat We're Looking For\n10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent building production retrieval, search, or RAG systems at scale.\nDeep Information Retrieval (IR) expertise: lexical retrieval (BM25, Lucene/Elasticsearch/OpenSearch), dense retrieval (embeddings, ANN indexes - FAISS, ScaNN, HNSW), hybrid retrieval, and learning-to-rank.\nHands-on experience with modern LLM-era retrieval: RAG architectures, query rewriting, re-ranking with cross-encoders, long-context strategies, and grounding techniques that reduce hallucination.\nExperience designing agentic systems on top of retrieval - search planners, multi-hop / iterative retrieval, self-reflection and sufficiency checks, tool-using agents that decide what to fetch and verify what came back.\nStrong grasp of relevance evaluation: nDCG, MRR, Precision@K, Recall@K; offline/online experimentation; LLM-as-judge frameworks; building human labeling pipelines.\nExperience working across structured and unstructured data - you've indexed and ranked over tables, code, and documents in the same system, and have opinions about how to do it well.\nTrack record of building 0→1: you've stood up a retrieval system from an empty repo, made the foundational architectural decisions, and grown it into something that customers depend on.\nDemonstrated ability to operate as a technical leader: setting direction across teams, mentoring senior engineers, and influencing roadmap with research, product, and platform partners.\nNice to Have\nExperience building retrieval over enterprise SaaS sources (permissions, freshness, multi-tenancy, ACL-aware indexing).\nBackground in agentic systems, tool use, or multi-turn retrieval for LLM agents.\nContributions to open-source IR/search projects, or publications at SIGIR, KDD, WWW, EMNLP, or similar venues.\nExperience training or fine-tuning embedding models, rerankers, or query understanding models.\nWhy This Role\nFoundational impact. Retrieval is the single biggest lever on agent quality. The stack you build will sit underneath every Databricks agent and every customer-built agent on our platform.\nGreenfield with scale. You get the rare combination of starting from a clean sheet and having immediate access to massive enterprise scale, real customer data, and a world-class research org.\nThe right team. You'll work alongside engineers and researchers behind Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake, MLflow, MosaicML, and DBRX.\nLocation\nThis role is based in our Mountain View, CA or San Francisco, CA office. Hybrid in-office collaboration expected.\nPay Range Transparency\nDatabricks is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range(s) for this role is listed below and represents the expected salary range for non-commissionable roles or on-target earnings for commissionable roles. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to job-related skills, depth of experience, relevant certifications and training, and specific work location. Based on the factors above, Databricks anticipates utilizing the full width of the range. The total compensation package for this position may also include eligibility for annual performance bonus, equity, and the benefits listed above. For more information regarding which range your location is in visit our page here.\nLocal Pay Range\n$228,600—$342,800 USD\nAbout Databricks\nDatabricks is the Data and AI company. More than 20,000 organizations worldwide - including adidas, AT&T, Bayer, Block, Mastercard, Rivian, Unilever, and 70% of the Fortune 500 - rely on the Databricks Data + AI Platform to build and scale data and AI apps, analytics and agents. Headquartered in San Francisco with 30+ offices around the globe, Databricks offers a unified platform that includes Genie, Lakebase, Agent Bricks, Lakeflow, Lakehouse, and Unity Catalog. To learn more, follow Databricks on LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and Instagram.\nBenefits\n 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 click here.\nOur Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion\nAt 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.\nCompliance\nIf 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":9385,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Query Engines & Big Data Processing","Data Warehouses & Lakehouses","MLOps"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-05-07T21:02:48Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 517 · green card filings: 130","filings_12m":517,"filings_prev_12m":400,"green_card_filings_12m":130,"median_offered_wage_usd":157253,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":267}],"liveness":{"score":19,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.676,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":165,"expected_fill_days":76,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":342800,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/databricks-senior-staff-applied-ai-engineer-context-retrieval","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/databricks-senior-staff-applied-ai-engineer-context-retrieval.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-20T18:01:01Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":20589,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-21T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":15},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=15"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fdatabricks-senior-staff-applied-ai-engineer-context-retrieval"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fdatabricks-senior-staff-applied-ai-engineer-context-retrieval"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fdatabricks-senior-staff-applied-ai-engineer-context-retrieval"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/databricks-senior-staff-applied-ai-engineer-context-retrieval\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fdatabricks-senior-staff-applied-ai-engineer-context-retrieval"}]}