Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Job description

What you can expect

Zoom is building the next generation of Agentic Search — a distributed search foundation that helps AI agents discover, reason over, and act on enterprise knowledge securely and at scale. In this role, you will design and build core search infrastructure for hybrid retrieval across meetings, chat, docs, whiteboards, and third-party enterprise applications. You will work on the system foundations behind keyword search, vector search, metadata filtering, permission-aware retrieval, and low-latency query serving across multi-tenant enterprise data.This is a high-impact opportunity to shape the search platform behind Zoom's AI ecosystem.

About the Team

The Agentic Search team sits within Zoom's GenAI Engineering organization and is responsible for building a multi-tenant, permission-aware search platform that supports large-scale distributed indexing and query serving, vector search and approximate nearest neighbor retrieval, hybrid search across keyword, vector, sparse, metadata, and permission signals, and search infrastructure for multi-step AI agents and enterprise workflows. We operate at the intersection of distributed systems, search infrastructure, vector databases, information retrieval, and large language models. Our mission is to help AI agents retrieve the right information, with the right permissions, at the right time — across first-party and third-party enterprise data sources.

Responsibilities:

What we’re looking for:

• 7+ years of experience building search infrastructure, vector databases, distributed databases, storage engines, or large-scale data platforms in production environments.

• Strong hands-on experience owning major components of systems similar to Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Lucene, Solr, Milvus, Qdrant, Vespa, Weaviate, or other distributed search and vector retrieval platforms.

• Possess understanding of:Information retrieval, Structured query systems, Knowledge graph or graph database concepts

• Strong understanding of vector search and ANN internals, including HNSW, IVF, PQ/SQ quantization, dense and sparse vector indexes, metadata filtering, and recall/latency trade-offs.

• Strong system design skills with the ability to reason from first principles about scale, reliability, latency, memory, storage, and cost.

• Experience operating high-scale, low-latency, multi-tenant infrastructure with clear production ownership.

• Ability to operate as a senior IC or technical lead, driving ambiguous infrastructure projects from design through production rollout.

Salary Range or On Target Earnings:

Minimum:

Maximum:

In addition to the base salary and/or OTE listed Zoom has a Total Direct Compensation philosophy that takes into consideration; base salary, bonus and equity value.

Note: Starting pay will be based on a number of factors and commensurate with qualifications & experience.

We also have a location based compensation structure;  there may be a different range for candidates in this and other locations.

Ways of Working
Our structured hybrid approach is centered around our offices and remote work environments. The work style of each role, Hybrid, Remote, or In-Person is indicated in the job description/posting.

Benefits
As part of our award-winning workplace culture and commitment to delivering happiness, our benefits program offers a variety of perks, benefits, and options to help employees maintain their physical, mental, emotional, and financial health; support work-life balance; and contribute to their community in meaningful ways. Click Learn for more information.

About Us
Zoomies help people stay connected so they can get more done together. We set out to build the best collaboration platform for the enterprise, and today help people communicate better with products like Zoom Contact Center, Zoom Phone, Zoom Events, Zoom Apps, Zoom Rooms, and Zoom Webinars.
We’re problem-solvers, working at a fast pace to design solutions with our customers and users in mind. Find room to grow with opportunities to stretch your skills and advance your career in a collaborative, growth-focused environment.

Our Commitment​

At Zoom, we believe great work happens when people feel supported and empowered. We’re committed to fair hiring practices that ensure every candidate is evaluated based on skills, experience, and potential. If you require an accommodation during the hiring process, let us know—we’re here to support you at every step.

We welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives including qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records and any qualified applicants requiring reasonable accommodations in accordance with the law.

If you need assistance navigating the interview process due to a medical disability, please submit an Accommodations Request Form and someone from our team will reach out soon. This form is solely for applicants who require an accommodation due to a qualifying medical disability. Non-accommodation-related requests, such as application follow-ups or technical issues, will not be addressed.

Think of this opportunity as a marathon, not a sprint! We're building a strong team at Zoom, and we're looking for talented individuals to join us for the long haul. No need to rush your application – take your time to ensure it's a good fit for your career goals. We continuously review applications, so submit yours whenever you're ready to take the next step.

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