Software Engineering Manager - Search

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 have 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. More than 2 million Verkada devices are deployed across 170+ countries.

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 set 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.

• Recruit, hire, and mentor a high-performing group of backend and ML engineers covering search infrastructure, computer vision, and applied AI.
• 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.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, CV/ML research, Camera Firmware, and Infrastructure teams.
• Drive the rollout of AI-Powered Search, LLM migrations, VLM experimentation, and agentic AI into production-grade features.
• Oversee the evolution of our vector search stack to improve recall, latency, and cost at fleet scale.
• Lead detection evaluation, model consistency, and ongoing quality improvements for various CV and ML pipelines.
• Accountable for a portfolio of production services including submission endpoints, inference pipelines, APIs and database layer.
• Execute in-flight migrations into new advanced pipelines and deprecations of old pipelines without disrupting customer-facing features.
• Drive large-org optimizations, inference engine stability, gRPC load balancing, and connection-hardening work.
• Own the team on-call rotation, post-mortem quality, and the new programs required to scale the team.
• Expand integration test coverage and search pipeline change testing.
• Define and track metrics via dashboards and service SLOs.

• 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.

• 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.

Verkada offers comprehensive wellness perks, benefits, and resources, including healthcare programs (100% covered for employee under at least one plan, 80% for family premiums), medical, vision and dental coverage, HSA with employer contributions, FSA, mental health support, paid parental leave, fertility benefits, paid holidays, flexible PTO, personal sick time, professional development stipend, wellness/fitness benefits, healthy lunches, and commuter benefits.

We do sponsor and take over sponsorship of employment visas for this role. Annual pay range: $200,000—$315,000 USD.