Software Engineering Manager - Search

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. You can look at all kinds of communities to see our platform’s impact in the world. 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 r