Staff Software Engineer - AI Research Infrastructure
Databricks3 months ago
Base Salary
$199k - $270k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design and implement infrastructure for large-scale experiments, data processing, and model training across HPC clusters, GPU fleets, or cloud-based systems.
- Build job submission, scheduling, monitoring, and experiment-management abstractions that enable rapid researcher iteration.
- Create research developer tooling, CI and testing infrastructure, and workflows that reduce experiment iteration time.
- Influence the long-term roadmap for research computation and how AI Research trains, evaluates, and ships models.
- Partner with research scientists, ML engineers, and platform teams to create robust, repeatable pipelines.
- Mentor engineers working on compute, infrastructure, and AI systems.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s, master’s, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field.
- At least 5 years of software engineering experience, including substantial experience with large-scale distributed systems or infrastructure.
- Deep experience building and operating distributed systems, data pipelines, or large-scale backend services, ideally involving GPUs, clusters, or major cloud providers.
- Proficiency in one or more systems programming languages, such as C++, Rust, Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to design, implement, and debug complex services.
- Experience building or significantly contributing to cluster schedulers, resource managers, or large-scale job orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, Slurm, Ray, or comparable internal systems.
- Understanding of modern ML training and inference workflows, including distributed training, model parallelism, fine-tuning, and evaluation.
- Experience taking complex systems from prototype to stable, well-owned services with strong operational reliability.
- Clear communication skills and the ability to translate between research needs and infrastructure realities.
Benefits
- Comprehensive employee benefits and perks, with region-specific offerings; annual performance bonus and equity may be available.
Tech Stack
About Databricks
Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 20,000 organizations worldwide — including adidas, AT&T, Bayer, Block, Mastercard, Rivian, Unilever, and over 60% of the Fortune 500 — rely on Databricks to build and scale data and AI apps, analytics and agents. Headquartered in San Francisco with 30+ offices around the globe, Databricks offers a unified Data Intelligence Platform that includes Agent Bricks, Lakeflow, Lakehouse, Lakebase and Unity Catalog. --- Databricks applicants Please apply through our official Careers page at databricks.com/company/careers. All official communication from Databricks will come from email addresses ending with @databricks.com or @goodtime.io (our meeting tool).