Senior Software Engineer, Model Serving

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.    Databricks’ Model Serving product provides enterprises with a unified, scalable, and governed platform to deploy and manage AI/ML models — from traditional ML to fine-tuned and proprietary large language models. It offers real-time, low-latency inference, governance, monitoring, and lineage. As AI adoption accelerates, Model Serving is a core pillar of the Databricks platform, enabling customers to operationalize models at scale with strong SLAs and cost efficiency.   As a Senior Engineer, you’ll play a critical role in shaping both the product experience and the foundational infrastructure of Model Serving. You will design and build systems that enable high-throughput, low-latency inference across CPU and GPU workloads, influence architectural direction, and collaborate closely across platform, product, infrastructure, and research teams to deliver a world-class serving platform.   The impact you will have: * Design and implement core systems and APIs that power Databricks Model Serving, ensuring scalability, reliability, and operational excellence. * Drive architectural decisions and trade-offs to optimize performance, throughput, autoscaling, and operational efficiency for CPU and GPU serving workloads. * Contribute directly to key components across the serving infrastructure — from model container builds and deployment workflows to runtime systems like routing, caching, observability, and intelligent autoscaling — 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. * Lead technical initiatives that improve latency, availability, and cost-effectiveness across both customer-facing and foundational serving layers. * Establish best practices for code quality, testing, and operational readiness, and mentor other engineers through design reviews and technical guidance.   What we look for: * 5+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems. * Experience in model serving, inference systems, or related infrastructure (e.g., routing, scheduling, autoscaling, and observability). * 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. * Experience building architecture for large-scale, performance-sensitive CPU/GPU inference systems. * Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across teams in fast-moving environments. * Customer-focused mindset with the ability to align implementation details with product goals. * 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 $166,000—$225,000 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.

About Pinterest: Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product. Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible. At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI. Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here. Intro: Pinterest’s Service Configuration & Coordination team builds the platforms, APIs, and tooling that make dynamic configuration and service coordination safe, scalable, and reliable for every service across regions and clouds, serving as the central hub for cross-functional alignment and system orchestration. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer (IC17), you’ll own the end-to-end technical strategy and long-term vision for our configuration and coordination infrastructure. You’ll define the future of these mission-critical systems, partnering closely with Traffic, Compute, Observability, and Cloud Architecture teams to deliver robust, high-performance solutions at scale. What you’ll do:  * Orchestrate the long-term technical vision for configuration ecosystems to ensure feature flags, ML settings, and experiments utilize unified paved paths. You will champion operational safety through standardized validation, staged rollout mechanisms, and robust governance frameworks across the organization. * Spearhead the transition from legacy substrates by migrating mission-critical use cases to modern platforms. You will establish scalable onboarding patterns that enable engineering teams to evolve their configuration lifecycle with precision and minimal friction. * Architect the next generation of control plane interfaces and diagnostic surfaces. By engineering high-performance, read-optimized APIs, you will empower human operators and automated assistants to seamlessly manage and reason about complex production states. * Direct the integration of coordination stacks within the broader deployment and multi-region landscape. Your leadership will refine service discovery and substrate architecture to accelerate regional expansion while eliminating bespoke toil and architectural circularity. * Leverage AI to catalyze infrastructure design and analytical phases, utilizing assistant-enabled workflows to synthesize partner requirements into executable roadmaps. You will maintain absolute accountability through rigorous data validation, metric-driven reviews, and comprehensive peer verification.   What we’re looking for: * Decade-plus mastery in high-scale infrastructure and distributed environments, with a track record of architecting or managing business-critical backend substrates in production settings. * Proven expertise in orchestrating cross-functional technical strategies for control-plane systems (e.g., experiments, feature flags, or ML config), unifying disparate teams around standardized and safe rollout methodologies. * Advanced proficiency in distributed coordination and substrate design—capable of navigating complex consistency models, failure domains, and the engineering of resilient, high-leverage abstractions. * Experience aligning configuration surfaces with deployment pipelines and orchestration frameworks (e.g., IaC or CI/CD), with a focus on mitigating architectural circularity and reducing service owner toil. * History of elevating senior engineering talent while steering parallel workstreams, synthesizing loosely coupled initiatives into a unified technical vision and executable roadmap. * Ability to catalyze execution via AI-enabled workflows (e.g., design synthesis, analytical phases, or documentation) while ensuring rigorous accountability through data validation, peer review, and metric-driven verification. * Extreme ownership and professional integrity: dedicated to safeguarding data, maintaining human-in-the-loop oversight for automated outputs, and taking full responsibility for long-term architectural outcomes. * Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.   Relocation Statement:  * This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.   In-Office Requirement Statement:  * We recognize that the ideal environment for work is situational and may differ across departments. What this looks like day-to-day can vary based on the needs of each organization or role. * This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times every 6-months and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country. #LI-REMOTE #LI-KBF At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise. Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here. US based applicants only $208,592—$429,454 USD Our Commitment to Inclusion: Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.   By submitting this application, I certify that all information submitted in my application and throughout the hiring process is true, accurate, and complete to the best of my knowledge. I understand that any false statement, omission, or misrepresentation may disqualify me from employment consideration or result in termination if discovered after hire.