Staff Engineer - Search
Level inferred from job title
Job description
Staff Engineer on the Search team at Staffbase, owning the search and retrieval platform that lets employees find information and get grounded AI answers across Staffbase and connected tools. The role defines retrieval, ranking and grounded-answer strategy on a mature multi-tenant platform.
At a glance
- Work mode
- Hybrid · Berlin, Germany · Chemnitz, Germany · Dresden, Germany
What you'll do
- Define and drive the search and retrieval strategy: hybrid (BM25 + vector) retrieval, reranking, query understanding and rewriting, chunking and embedding choices
- Build and evolve the core ingestion and query pipeline, from sync and indexing to ranked results and AI summaries with citations
- Own search quality: build evaluation tooling and golden sets (including unanswerable and permission-varying queries), define relevance metrics, and turn them into decisions
- Protect the non-negotiables at scale: permission-aware retrieval, tenant isolation, multilingual handling, and graceful degradation when a dependency is slow or down
- Balance latency, quality and cost, for example what runs on the fast path versus what is allowed on the slow path
- Make search observable: tracing, relevance dashboards, and a clear way to debug why a result did or did not appear
- Lead technical strategy and architecture, and document key decisions so others can build on them
- Take ownership of major technical decisions, proactively addressing bottlenecks and ensuring product quality
- Work with Product and Design to turn user problems into measurable search improvements
- Contribute to technical roadmaps with engineering leadership, and coordinate with teams that feed or consume search (content, integrations, Navigator)
- Mentor and guide engineers through code reviews, design discussions and experiment reviews
- Foster a culture of ownership, technical excellence and continuous improvement with teams that feed or consume search (content, integrations, Navigator)
What we're looking for
- Proven track record as a Staff Engineer or Technical Lead with strong leadership and problem-solving skills
- Proven experience building production search or retrieval systems (OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Solr or similar), including relevance tuning, analyzers, and index design
- Hands-on experience with modern retrieval: vector/kNN search, hybrid fusion (e.g. RRF), cross-encoder reranking, chunking and embeddings; ideally RAG or LLM-grounded answers
- A measurement mindset: you've built or used relevance evaluation (recall, MRR, nDCG, golden sets, LLM-as-judge with human checks) and can tell a real improvement from noise
- Strong understanding of multi-tenant architecture and permission-aware retrieval, with good judgment on security and isolation in search
- Experience with latency-sensitive systems: budgets, timeouts, caching, fallbacks and degradation
- Extensive experience with Kotlin/Java (or Go) on the backend; comfortable with React/TypeScript on the frontend
- Knowledge of architecture and design patterns, and the judgment to make trade-offs and weigh their long-term impact
- Strong communication skills, able to explain relevance and ranking trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Experience working with Product and Design leaders to deliver customer value in an Agile environment
- Passion for building high-quality software
- Passion for diversity and inclusion, and the ability to foster a culture where everyone's voice is heard
Nice to have
- Multilingual search (analyzers, language detection, cross-language retrieval)
- Query understanding: rewriting, expansion, typeahead and spell correction
- Prompt-injection and data-poisoning awareness in RAG systems
- Experience with LLM observability and evaluation tooling
Your team
Search team
Owns the full path from query to result: indexing and embeddings, hybrid keyword and semantic retrieval, ranking and reranking, typeahead, and the AI summaries that answer questions with citations. Search is also a core source of knowledge for Navigator, the AI assistant.
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About Staffbase
We inspire people to achieve great things together
Staffbase provides an AI-native Employee Experience Platform with agentic AI communications channels - intranet, employee app and email solutions - that create engaging experiences and connect employees. Headquartered in Chemnitz, Germany and New York City, with offices in Berlin, London, Sydney, Tokyo, Prague, and Minneapolis–St. Paul, the team of 550+ employees supports 1,500+ customers reaching over 14 million employees.
Mission
To help organizations unlock the power of inspirational communication with the first AI-native Employee Experience Platform
Key facts
- 550+ employees
- Chemnitz, Germany and New York City
- Employee Experience / workplace communication software
- Unicorn company privately valued at over $1 billion
- Supports 1,500+ customers reaching over 14 million employees
- Offices in Berlin, London, Sydney, Tokyo, Prague, and Minneapolis–St. Paul
- First AI-native Employee Experience Platform
- Follows the "You build it, you run it" approach
What they value
- Diversity and inclusivity
- Ownership
- Technical excellence
- Continuous improvement
- Work-life balance