Staff Software Engineer, Foundation Model API

Databricks

At Databricks, we are passionate about enabling data teams to solve the world's toughest problems — from making the next mode of transportation a reality to accelerating the development of medical breakthroughs. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform so our customers can use deep data insights to improve their business.    Foundation Model Serving is the API Product for hosting and serving frontier AI model inference for open source models like Llama, Qwen, and GPT OSS as well as proprietary models like Claude and OpenAI GPT. For this role, no prior ML or AI experience is necessary. We’re looking for engineers who have owned high scale operational sensitive systems like customer facing APIs, Edge Gateways, ML Inference, or similar services and have an interest in getting deep building LLM APIs and runtimes at scale.   As a Staff Engineer, you’ll play a critical role in shaping both the product experience and core infrastructure. You will design and build systems that enable high-throughput, low-latency inference on GPU workloads with frontier models, influence architectural direction, and collaborate closely across platform, product, infrastructure, and research teams to deliver a world-class foundation model API product.   The impact you will have:   * Design and implement core systems and APIs that power Databricks Foundation Model Serving, ensuring scalability, reliability, and operational excellence. * Partner with product and engineering leadership to define the technical roadmap and long-term architecture for serving workloads. * Drive architectural decisions and trade-offs to optimize performance, throughput, autoscaling, and operational efficiency for GPU serving workloads. * Contribute directly to key components across the serving infrastructure — from working in systems like vLLM and SGLang to creating token based rate limiters and optimizers — ensuring smooth and efficient operations at scale. * Collaborate cross-functionally with product, platform, and research teams to translate customer needs into reliable and performant systems. * Establish best practices for code quality, testing, and operational readiness, and mentor other engineers through design reviews and technical guidance. * Represent the team in cross-organizational technical discussions and influence Databricks’ broader AI platform strategy.   What we look for:   * 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems. * Experience leading high-scale operationally sensitive backend systems. * A track record of up-leveling teams engineering excellence. * Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and system design as applied to large-scale, low-latency serving systems. * Proven ability to deliver technically complex, high-impact initiatives that create measurable customer or business value. * Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across teams in fast-moving environments. * Strategic and product-oriented mindset with the ability to align technical execution with long-term vision. * Passion for mentoring, growing engineers, and fostering technical excellence.   Pay Range Transparency Databricks is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range(s) for this role is listed below and represents the expected salary range for non-commissionable roles or on-target earnings for commissionable roles.  Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to job-related skills, depth of experience, relevant certifications and training, and specific work location. Based on the factors above, Databricks anticipates utilizing the full width of the range. The total compensation package for this position may also include eligibility for annual performance bonus, equity, and the benefits listed above. For more information regarding which range your location is in visit our page here.   Local Pay Range $192,000—$260,000 USD About Databricks Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 10,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, Grammarly, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify and democratize data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Benefits At Databricks, we strive to provide comprehensive benefits and perks that meet the needs of all of our employees. For specific details on the benefits offered in your region click here. Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion At Databricks, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can excel. We take great care to ensure that our hiring practices are inclusive and meet equal employment opportunity standards. Individuals looking for employment at Databricks are considered without regard to age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other protected characteristics. Compliance If access to export-controlled technology or source code is required for performance of job duties, it is within Employer's discretion whether to apply for a U.S. government license for such positions, and Employer may decline to proceed with an applicant on this basis alone.

Databricks

P-1285 ABOUT THIS ROLE As a staff software engineer for GenAI inference, you will lead the architecture, development, and optimization of the inference engine that powers Databricks Foundation Model API.. You’ll bridge research advances and production demands, ensuring high throughput, low latency, and robust scaling. Your work will encompass the full GenAI inference stack: kernels, runtimes, orchestration, memory, and integration with frameworks and orchestration systems. WHAT YOU WILL DO * Own and drive the architecture, design, and implementation of the inference engine, and collaborate on model-serving stack optimized for large-scale LLMs inference * Partner closely with researchers to bring new model architectures or features (sparsity, activation compression, mixture-of-experts) into the engine * Lead the end-to-end optimization for latency, throughput, memory efficiency, and hardware utilization across GPUs, and accelerators * Define and guide standards to build and maintain instrumentation, profiling, and tracing tooling to uncover bottlenecks and guide optimizations * Architect scalable routing, batching, scheduling, memory management, and dynamic loading mechanisms for inference workloads * Ensure reliability, reproducibility, and fault tolerance in the inference pipelines, including A/B launches, rollback, and model versioning * Collaborate cross-functionally on Integrating with federated, distributed inference infrastructure – orchestrate across nodes, balance load, handle communication overhead * Drive cross-team collaboration: with platform engineers, cloud infrastructure, and security/compliance teams * Represent the team externally through benchmarks, whitepapers, and open-source contributions WHAT WE LOOK FOR * BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, or a related field * Strong software engineering background (6+ years or equivalent) in performance-critical systems * Proven track record of owning complex system components and driving architectural decisions end-to-end * Deep understanding of ML inference internals: attention, MLPs, recurrent modules, quantization, sparse operations, etc. * Hands-on experience with CUDA, GPU programming, and key libraries (cuBLAS, cuDNN, NCCL, etc.) * Strong background in distributed systems design, including RPC frameworks, queuing, RPC batching, sharding, memory partitioning * Demonstrated ability to uncover and solve performance bottlenecks across layers (kernel, memory, networking, scheduler) * Experience building instrumentation, tracing, and profiling tools for ML models * Ability to lead through influence - work closely with ML researchers, translate novel model ideas into production systems * Excellent communication and leadership skills, with a proactive and ownership-driven mindset * Bonus: published research or open-source contributions in ML systems, inference optimization, or model serving     Pay Range Transparency Databricks is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range(s) for this role is listed below and represents the expected salary range for non-commissionable roles or on-target earnings for commissionable roles.  Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to job-related skills, depth of experience, relevant certifications and training, and specific work location. Based on the factors above, Databricks anticipates utilizing the full width of the range. The total compensation package for this position may also include eligibility for annual performance bonus, equity, and the benefits listed above. For more information regarding which range your location is in visit our page here.   Local Pay Range $190,900—$232,800 USD About Databricks Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 10,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, Grammarly, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify and democratize data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Benefits At Databricks, we strive to provide comprehensive benefits and perks that meet the needs of all of our employees. For specific details on the benefits offered in your region click here. Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion At Databricks, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can excel. We take great care to ensure that our hiring practices are inclusive and meet equal employment opportunity standards. Individuals looking for employment at Databricks are considered without regard to age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other protected characteristics. Compliance If access to export-controlled technology or source code is required for performance of job duties, it is within Employer's discretion whether to apply for a U.S. government license for such positions, and Employer may decline to proceed with an applicant on this basis alone.

Databricks

At Databricks, we are passionate about enabling data teams to solve the world's toughest problems — from making the next mode of transportation a reality to accelerating the development of medical breakthroughs. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform so our customers can use deep data insights to improve their business.    Foundation Model Serving is the API Product for hosting and serving frontier AI model inference for open source models like Llama, Qwen, and GPT OSS as well as proprietary models like Claude and OpenAI GPT. For this role, no prior ML or AI experience is necessary. We’re looking for engineers who have owned high scale operational sensitive systems like customer facing APIs, Edge Gateways, ML Inference, or similar services and have an interest in getting deep building LLM APIs and runtimes at scale.   As a Staff Engineer, you’ll play a critical role in shaping both the product experience and core infrastructure. You will design and build systems that enable high-throughput, low-latency inference on GPU workloads with frontier models, influence architectural direction, and collaborate closely across platform, product, infrastructure, and research teams to deliver a world-class foundation model API product.   The impact you will have:   * Design and implement core systems and APIs that power Databricks Foundation Model Serving, ensuring scalability, reliability, and operational excellence. * Partner with product and engineering leadership to define the technical roadmap and long-term architecture for serving workloads. * Drive architectural decisions and trade-offs to optimize performance, throughput, autoscaling, and operational efficiency for GPU serving workloads. * Contribute directly to key components across the serving infrastructure — from working in systems like vLLM and SGLang to creating token based rate limiters and optimizers — ensuring smooth and efficient operations at scale. * Collaborate cross-functionally with product, platform, and research teams to translate customer needs into reliable and performant systems. * Establish best practices for code quality, testing, and operational readiness, and mentor other engineers through design reviews and technical guidance. * Represent the team in cross-organizational technical discussions and influence Databricks’ broader AI platform strategy.   What we look for:   * 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems. * Experience leading high-scale operationally sensitive backend systems. * A track record of up-leveling teams engineering excellence. * Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and system design as applied to large-scale, low-latency serving systems. * Proven ability to deliver technically complex, high-impact initiatives that create measurable customer or business value. * Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across teams in fast-moving environments. * Strategic and product-oriented mindset with the ability to align technical execution with long-term vision. * Passion for mentoring, growing engineers, and fostering technical excellence.   Pay Range Transparency Databricks is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range(s) for this role is listed below and represents the expected salary range for non-commissionable roles or on-target earnings for commissionable roles.  Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to job-related skills, depth of experience, relevant certifications and training, and specific work location. Based on the factors above, Databricks anticipates utilizing the full width of the range. The total compensation package for this position may also include eligibility for annual performance bonus, equity, and the benefits listed above. For more information regarding which range your location is in visit our page here.   Local Pay Range $192,000—$260,000 USD About Databricks Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 10,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, Grammarly, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify and democratize data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Benefits At Databricks, we strive to provide comprehensive benefits and perks that meet the needs of all of our employees. For specific details on the benefits offered in your region click here. Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion At Databricks, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can excel. We take great care to ensure that our hiring practices are inclusive and meet equal employment opportunity standards. Individuals looking for employment at Databricks are considered without regard to age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other protected characteristics. Compliance If access to export-controlled technology or source code is required for performance of job duties, it is within Employer's discretion whether to apply for a U.S. government license for such positions, and Employer may decline to proceed with an applicant on this basis alone.