Engineering Manager — AI Search & Multimodal Platforms

Verkada; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 315,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

Verkada is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Search team, overseeing AI-powered search and computer vision across billions of frames. You will shape the backend, vector databases, and embedding-based retrieval, guiding a team of backend, frontend, and ML engineers to deliver an ambitious roadmap with reliability and cost efficiency at the forefront.

You will partner with Product, Design, CV/ML research, and Infrastructure to drive AI search initiatives, LLM/VLM migrations, and scalable

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years managing backend or ML engineering teams.
• Track record leading 5+ engineers running production services at meaningful scale.
• 4+ years of hands‑on experience in at least two of: information retrieval, vector / embeddings-based search, computer vision, or large‑scale recommendation systems.
• 2+ years productionizing modern LLMs, VLMs, or agentic systems (evals, guardrails, latency/cost tuning).
• Deep proficiency in Python plus Go/Java/C++; fluent in distributed systems (gRPC, Kafka) and a major cloud provider (AWS preferred). Hands‑on with at least one production vector database or search engine (OpenSearch, Turbopuffer, FAISS, Milvus, pgvector, etc.).
• Strong operational instincts: on-call ownership, post-mortem rigor, and a habit of defining metrics and building evals to drive quality on high-availability services.

Responsibilities

• Build the Team: Recruit, hire, and mentor a high-performing group of backend and ML engineers covering search infrastructure, computer vision, and applied AI.
• Strategic Oversight: Own the end-to-end roadmap for Search and ML engineering backend from product-facing features to platform services.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Align with Product, Design, CV/ML research, Camera Firmware, and Infrastructure teams.
• Agentic & Generative AI: Drive rollout of AI-Powered Search, LLM migrations, VLM experimentation, and agentic AI into production-grade features.
• Embeddings & Retrieval: Oversee evolution of vector search stack to improve recall, latency, and cost at fleet scale.
• Model Evaluation: Lead detection evaluation, model consistency, and ongoing quality improvements for CV/ML pipelines.
• Service Ownership: Accountable for production services including submission endpoints, inference pipelines, APIs and database layer.
• Migrations & Deprecations: Execute migrations into new pipelines and deprecations of old pipelines without disrupting features.
• Scalability & Performance: Drive large-org optimizations, inference engine stability, gRPC load balancing, and connection-hardening.
• On-Call & Incident Response: Own the team on-call rotation, post-mortem quality, and new programs to scale the team.
• Test Coverage: Expand integration test coverage and search pipeline change testing.
• Telemetry & Dashboards: Define and track metrics via dashboards and service SLOs.

Skills

Backend engineering

ML engineering

Information retrieval

Vector search

Computer vision

LLMs/VLMs

Distributed systems

Python

Go/Java/C++

OpenSearch

Milvus

pgvector

FAISS

Turbopuffer

Tools

OpenSearch

Milvus

pgvector

FAISS

Turbopuffer

Job description

Verkada is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Search team, overseeing AI-powered search and computer vision across billions of frames. You will shape the backend, vector databases, and embedding-based retrieval, guiding a team of backend, frontend, and ML engineers to deliver an ambitious roadmap with reliability and cost efficiency at the forefront.

You will partner with Product, Design, CV/ML research, and Infrastructure to drive AI search initiatives, LLM/VLM migrations, and scalable