Staff / Sr. ML Engineer, Web Indexing

We’re looking for an ML Engineer to help build and scale the indexing infrastructure powering web and image search. The team runs both petabyte-scale offline batch pipelines and near-real-time indexing systems that turn web documents, images, and metadata into production-ready indexes. We work across distributed computing, data processing, and storage, while partnering with crawling, ranking, ML, retrieval, and infrastructure teams to shape the long-term indexing strategy. This is a cross-functional role requiring strong technical depth, organizational influence, and the ability to drive complex, multi-team initiatives.

You’ll own both technical direction and execution for two core systems: large-scale offline indexing (distributed pipelines processing petabytes of content into production indexes) and fresh/near-real-time indexing (low-latency propagation of new or updated content). Responsibilities span architecture, scalability, reliability, and efficiency across billions of documents and images. Success requires close collaboration across teams to resolve dependencies, make architecture tradeoffs, and drive large programs to completion, while acting as a key liaison to senior leadership on strategy, risks, and resourcing.

Minimum Qualifications

• Significant experience building large-scale distributed systems or data infrastructure
• Engineering management experience leading software teams
• Strong grasp of distributed systems, large-scale data processing, and storage
• Experience with distributed batch processing (e.g., MapReduce-style models)
• Track record leading multi-team technical initiatives and influencing without direct authority
• Strong communication skills for technical topics with senior leadership
• BS in CS or related field, or equivalent experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with batch/streaming frameworks (Spark, Beam, Flink, Kafka, etc.)
• Experience with distributed storage systems (Bigtable, HBase, Cassandra)
• Background in search, information retrieval, or large-scale content processing
• Experience with image processing, computer vision, or multimodal systems
• Experience optimizing distributed systems for cost, latency, and throughput
• Experience driving cross-org programs and presenting strategy to executive leadership
• Track record developing senior engineers into technical leadership roles