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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Principal Machine Learning Engineer- Search Quality - **Company:** Snowflake Inc. - **Location:** Clyde Hill, WA, United States - **Experience:** Expert - **Salary:** $264,000.0 - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** A/B Testing, Artificial Intelligence, Apache Lucene, Distributed Systems, Elasticsearch, Information Retrieval, Search Algorithms, Machine Learning, Open Source Technology, Software Architecture, Search Technologies, User Environment Management, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Large Language Models, Snowflake, Data Analytics - **Published:** May 14, 2026 - **Apply:** https://seeker-sp.worksourcewa.com/jobview/GetJob.aspx?JobID=293411971 ## About the Role * 15+ years of industry experience designing, building and supporting large scale distributed services. * Has built and optimized search systems at Snowflake-scale or equivalent high-growth environments. * Possesses a startup mindset, acting with urgency to deliver incremental improvements while building toward a long-term vision. * Is a subject matter expert in the latest developments in NLP, LLMs, and their application to Information Retrieval. * Search Domain Expertise: Deep, hands-on experience with search technologies (e.g., Lucene/Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, vector databases) and a proven track record of improving search relevance and ranking at scale. * Deep ML Expertise: Extensive experience in machine learning specifically applied to search quality, including Learning to Rank (LTR), query understanding, and personalized ranking. * Hybrid Search Techniques: Intimate familiarity with blending semantic (vector-based, embeddings) and syntactic search (keyword-based, BM25) to achieve state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy. * Data-Driven Leadership: Ability to build a disciplined approach to search quality, including the design of evaluation frameworks (e.g., NDCG, MRR), A/B testing methodologies, and human-in-the-loop evaluation pipelines. * Technical Visionary: Demonstrated ability to translate high-level product goals into technical roadmaps and influence engineering teams to execute on a unified vision for Universal Search. * AI Agentic Frameworks: A forward-looking understanding of how traditional search systems must evolve to support AI agents, specifically focusing on RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and tool-use retrieval. * Distributed Systems: Strong foundation in building and scaling high-performance distributed systems that serve low-latency search results across massive, heterogeneous datasets. * Cross-Functional Collaboration: Proven ability to partner with and influence, Product Management and Data Science and AI team to define quality metrics and align technical investments with business impact. NICE TO HAVE * Multi-Modal Search: Experience with multi-modal search (text, image, code) and understanding of how different corpuses (like Notebooks vs. Documentation) require specialized retrieval strategies. * Open Source Contribution: Active contributions to the search or ML open-source community. * User Experience Empathy: A strong sense of how search quality directly impacts the end-user experience and the ability to advocate for the user in architectural decisions. ## Description At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don't just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset - who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done., We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to serve as the technical leader for Search Quality. This individual will be responsible for transforming how we measure and improve search relevance, moving from heuristic-based approaches to a disciplined, data-driven framework. You will identify key areas of investment, bridge the gap between traditional search and modern AI, and ensure that our search technology is ready for the next generation of AI-driven agentic workflows. ## Related Videos - [Writing a full-text search engine in TypeScript](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/504-writing-a-full-text-search-engine-in-typescript) - [OLAP for AI Applications and why you should care](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100212-olap-for-ai-applications-and-why-you-should-care) - [Bringing the power of AI to your application.](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1010-bringing-the-power-of-ai-to-your-application) - [How Cisco embraced a DevOps culture within its network engineering team](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/99-how-cisco-embraced-a-devops-culture-within-its-network-engineering-team) - [Add Location-based Searching to Site with ElasticSearch](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/77-add-location-based-searching-to-site-with-elasticsearch) - [Hacking AI at the Edge of the Indian Ocean](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100177-hacking-ai-at-the-edge-of-the-indian-ocean) ## Related Articles - [SEO in an AI world - Google vs. ChatGPT and survival tips for content creators](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/534-seo-in-an-ai-world-google-vs-chatgpt-and-survival-tips-for-content-creators) - [What Are Large Language Models?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/304-what-are-large-language-models) - [Got AI ideas but no money? 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