Software Engineering Manager - Search

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

Who We Are

Verkada is transforming how organizations protect their people and places with an integrated, privacy-sensitive AI-powered platform that includes solutions for video security, access control, air quality sensors, alarms, intercoms, and visitor management.

We’ve got serious momentum in the market: more than 30,000 customers (including 100+ of the Fortune 500), a $5.8B valuation, more than $1 billion in annualized bookings, and backing from CapitalG, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Felicis Ventures, Next47 and more. Physical AI is one of the most consequential technology shifts of our time, and Verkada is at the center of it.
It’s the retailer that uses our agentic AI to deter theft before it happens. The warehouse that uses AI-powered alerts to make sure its team is protected on the floor with proper PPE. The school that’s alerted to a threat in real-time and triggers a lockdown in seconds, not minutes. We’re rapidly scaling this impact: today, more than 2 million Verkada devices are deployed across 170+ countries.

About The Role

We are hiring an Engineering Manager to lead Verkada’s Search team, the group responsible for the AI-powered search and computer vision capabilities that make our camera fleet best in class in investigation and alerting. From face and person search to license plate recognition, reverse image search, and our next generation of LLM‑and VLM‑powered agentic experiences, the Search team owns the backend systems that let our customers find what they need across billions of frames in seconds.

As the leader of this team you will not just be managing engineers; you will be setting the technical direction for how Verkada defines search with embedding-based retrieval all to an agentic, multi‑modal experience powered by modern LLMs and VLMs. You will own a portfolio of production services (API, inference pipelines, vector databases, etc.), drive active migrations, and hire, mentor, and scale a team of backend, frontend, and ML engineers to execute against an ambitious product roadmap while raising the bar on reliability, latency, and cost.

What You’ll Do

Leadership & Team Building

• 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 like POI, LPR, and AI Search to the platform services that power them.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner closely with Product, Design, CV/ML research, Camera Firmware, and Infrastructure teams to align on priorities, dependencies, and deployment plans.

AI Search & Applied ML (Hands-On)

• Agentic & Generative AI: Drive the rollout of AI-Powered Search, LLM migrations, VLM experimentation, and agentic AI into production-grade features.
• Embeddings & Retrieval: Oversee the evolution of our vector search stack to improve recall, latency, and cost at fleet scale.
• Model Evaluation: Lead detection evaluation, model consistency, and ongoing quality improvements for various CV and ML pipelines.

Search Infrastructure & Platform

• Service Ownership: Accountable for a portfolio of production services including submission endpoints, inference pipelines, APIs and database layer.
• Migrations & Deprecations: Execute in-flight migrations into new advanced pipelines and deprecations of old pipelines without disrupting customer-facing features.
• Scalability & Performance: Drive large-org optimizations, inference engine stability, gRPC load balancing, and connection-hardening work to keep the pipeline healthy as the fleet grows.

Reliability & Quality

• On-Call & Incident Response: Own the team on-call rotation, post-mortem quality, and the new programs required to scale the team.
• Test Coverage: Expand integration test coverage and search pipeline change testing to catch regressions before they reach production.
• Telemetry & Dashboards: Define and track the metrics that matter (e.g. API latency, search quality, inference stability, field reliability, etc.) via dashboards and service SLOs.

What You Bring

• 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.

Nice to Haves

• Experience integrating foundation models via open-source GPU inference stacks.
• Familiarity with face recognition, person re-identification, LPR, or similar fine-grained CV pipelines.
• Background in physical security, video surveillance, or IoT/connected-device domains.
• CI/CD experience for ML/search services.

US Employee Benefits

Verkada is committed to fostering a workplace environment that prioritizes the holistic health and wellbeing of our employees and their families by offering comprehensive wellness perks, benefits, and resources. Our benefits and perks programs include, but are not limited to:

• Healthcare programs that can be tailored to meet the personal health and financial well‑being needs - Premiums are 100% covered for the employee under at least one plan and 80% for family premiums under all plans
• Nationwide medical, vision and dental coverage
• Health Saving Account (HSA) with annual employer contributions and Flexible Spending Account (FSA) with tax saving options
• Expanded mental health support
• Paid parental leave policy & fertility benefits
• Time off to relax and recharge through our paid holidays, firmwide extended holidays, flexible PTO and personal sick time
• Professional development stipend
• Fertility Stipend
• Wellness/fitness benefits
• Healthy lunches provided daily
• Commuter benefits

Additional Information

• We do sponsor and take over sponsorship of employment visas for this role. If we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa.

Annual Pay Range

At Verkada, we want to attract and retain the best employees, and compensate them in a way that appropriately and fairly values their individual contribution to the company. With that in mind, we carefully consider a number of factors to determine the appropriate starting pay for an employee, including their primary work location and an assessment of a candidate's skills and experience, as well as market demands and internal parity. A Verkada employee may be eligible for additional forms of compensation, depending on their role, including sales incentives, discretionary bonuses, and/or equity in the company in the form of restricted stock units (RSUs)

Below is the annual on-target earnings (OTE) range for full-time employees for this position, comprised of base compensation and commissions (if applicable).

Estimated Annual Pay Range

$200,000—$315,000 USD

Verkada Is An Equal Opportunity Employer

As an equal opportunity employer, Verkada is committed to providing employment opportunities to all individuals. All applicants for positions at Verkada will be treated without regard to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, marital status, veteran status, pregnancy, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.

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