A Unified Structured Query Understanding Framework for Industrial Semantic Search

Query understanding in large-scale industrial search systems is typically implemented as a cascade of disparate, task-specific components. While individually optimizable, this fragmented architecture incurs high maintenance overhead and results in inconsistent behaviors, particularly for long-tail queries. In this work, we propose and deploy a unified structured query understanding system that consolidates these heterogeneous functions into a single Small Language Model (SLM) that performs schema-constrained generation. To address the data bottlenecks inherent in unified modeling, we introduce Query Illuminator, a dual-purpose framework serving as: (i) a teacher model for high-quality auto-annotation and distillation, and (ii) a surrogate judge for scalable evaluation where human labels are scarce. We validate this approach through extensive offline and online tests within LinkedIn's Job Search system. Furthermore, we demonstrate the framework's horizontal extensibility through a cross-domain case study on People Search. The results show improved user engagement and reduced operational costs, achieved while satisfying strict low-latency serving constraints on limited GPU resources.

SAGE: Scalable AI Governance & Evaluation

Evaluating relevance in large-scale search systems is fundamentally constrained by the governance gap between nuanced, resource-constrained human oversight and the high-throughput requirements of production systems. While traditional approaches rely on engagement proxies or sparse manual review, these methods often fail to capture the full scope of high-impact relevance failures. We present \textbf{SAGE} (Scalable AI Governance \& Evaluation), a framework that operationalizes high-quality human product judgment as a scalable evaluation signal. At the core of SAGE is a bidirectional calibration loop where natural-language \emph{Policy}, curated \emph{Precedent}, and an \emph{LLM Surrogate Judge} co-evolve. SAGE systematically resolves semantic ambiguities and misalignments, transforming subjective relevance judgment into an executable, multi-dimensional rubric with near human-level agreement. To bridge the gap between frontier model reasoning and industrial-scale inference, we apply teacher-student distillation to transfer high-fidelity judgments into compact student surrogates at \textbf{92$\times$} lower cost. Deployed within LinkedIn Search ecosystems, SAGE guided model iteration through simulation-driven development, distilling policy-aligned models for online serving and enabling rapid offline evaluation. In production, it powered policy oversight that measured ramped model variants and detected regressions invisible to engagement metrics. Collectively, these drove a \textbf{0.25\%} lift in LinkedIn daily active users.

Semantic Search At LinkedIn

Semantic search with large language models (LLMs) enables retrieval by meaning rather than keyword overlap, but scaling it requires major inference efficiency advances. We present LinkedIn's LLM-based semantic search framework for AI Job Search and AI People Search, combining an LLM relevance judge, embedding-based retrieval, and a compact Small Language Model trained via multi-teacher distillation to jointly optimize relevance and engagement. A prefill-oriented inference architecture co-designed with model pruning, context compression, and text-embedding hybrid interactions boosts ranking throughput by over 75x under a fixed latency constraint while preserving near-teacher-level NDCG, enabling one of the first production LLM-based ranking systems with efficiency comparable to traditional approaches and delivering significant gains in quality and user engagement.