Staff Engineer - Search

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Staff Engineer - Search in Others new

Staffbase
Full time
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Others
11/07/2026
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Berlin, Germany

Responsibilities

Define and drive the search and retrieval strategy across hybrid BM25 and vector retrieval, reranking, query understanding, rewriting, chunking, and embeddings.
Build and evolve ingestion, indexing, query, ranking, and AI-summary pipelines with source citations.
Own search quality through evaluation tooling, golden query sets, relevance metrics, offline evaluations, and online signals.
Ensure permission-aware retrieval, tenant isolation, multilingual handling, graceful degradation, and appropriate latency, quality, and cost trade-offs.
Improve search observability through tracing, relevance dashboards, and debugging tools.
Lead technical strategy, architecture, documentation, major technical decisions, and technical roadmaps.
Collaborate with Product, Design, content, integrations, and Navigator teams to deliver measurable search improvements.
Mentor and guide engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and experiment reviews while fostering technical excellence and ownership.

Requirements

Proven track record as a Staff Engineer or Technical Lead with strong leadership and problem-solving skills.
Production experience building search or retrieval systems with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Solr, or similar technologies, including relevance tuning, analyzers, and index design.
Hands-on experience with vector or kNN search, hybrid fusion such as RRF, cross-encoder reranking, chunking, embeddings, and ideally RAG or LLM-grounded answers.
Experience with relevance evaluation methods including recall, MRR, nDCG, golden sets, and LLM-as-judge with human checks.
Strong understanding of multi-tenant architecture, permission-aware retrieval, security, and isolation in search.
Experience designing latency-sensitive systems with budgets, timeouts, caching, fallbacks, and graceful degradation.
Extensive backend experience with Kotlin, Java, or Go, plus comfort with React and TypeScript on the frontend.
Knowledge of architecture and design patterns, long-term trade-off analysis, and technical decision-making.
Strong communication skills and experience explaining relevance and ranking trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Experience working with Product and Design leaders in an Agile environment.
Passion for high-quality software, diversity, inclusion, and fostering an environment where all voices are heard.
Preferred experience includes multilingual search, query rewriting and expansion, typeahead, spell correction, prompt-injection and data-poisoning awareness in RAG systems, and LLM observability and evaluation tooling.

Benefits

Competitive salary packages including an LTIP unit-based Long Term Incentive Plan.
Flexible working time models and the option of hybrid work, supported by a yearly €1560 flex work allowance.
31 vacation days annually, including one floating holiday, plus pro rata fully paid Fridays off during August.
Company pension scheme.
One paid Volunteers Day per year for supporting a social project.

Salary: Competitive

Staffbase

Staffbase builds an employee communications and experience platform for enterprises to reach frontline and desk-based workers. Its SaaS suite includes a branded employee app, intranet, email and SMS tools, digital signage, and Microsoft 365/Teams integrations managed from a single console. Founde...

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