Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

Databricks

Who we are 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. Founded by engineers — and customer obsessed — we leap at every opportunity to tackle technical challenges, from designing next-gen UI/UX for interfacing with data to scaling our services and infrastructure across millions of virtual machines. And we're only getting started. Our AI-powered Assistant serves as the initial point of contact for customers seeking assistance on how to use our platform effectively. The Customer Engagement and Docs platform team's objective is to help customers resolve their problems faster using AI / LLMs.  We provide customers with precise and comprehensive solutions to their problems or build experiences to facilitate a seamless escalation to a support agent when necessary.  As a Staff Engineer, you will operate at the intersection of Product development and Machine Learning. Responsibilities include gaining a deep understanding of user behavior; identifying factors contributing to problems; leveraging Product, Machine Learning (ML) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze intricate technical use cases within a secure enterprise environment and eventually providing a path to resolving them. The impact you will have: * Lead design, development, and deployment of systems for Evaluation, Answer retrieval and Quality improvement for helping customers.  * Lead architectural decisions to ensure performance, reliability, and accuracy of the knowledge systems. * Drive best practices for engineering excellence, including design reviews, code quality, testing strategies, and performance optimizations. * Deliver high-quality, production-ready code and services end-to-end — including performance tuning, resiliency improvements, and debugging in live environments. * Contribute to longer-term technical planning and support strategic initiatives in Assistant and Support organizations.   What we look for: * 6+ years of industry experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems. * Demonstrated technical proficiency in machine learning and software engineering, coupled with a strong product-oriented approach. * The capacity to define and structure solutions in ambiguous problem domains. * Ability to mentor and guide junior engineers, as well as to effectively collaborate across various team boundaries. * Track record of driving high-impact, technically complex initiatives that delivered clear customer or business value. * Prior experience with retrieval systems and search technologies is a plus.   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 $190,000—$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-188 Our mission at Databricks is to radically simplify the whole data lifecycle from ingestion to ETL, BI, and all the way up to ML/AI with a unified platform. To achieve this goal, we believe the data warehouse architecture as we know it today will be replaced by a new architectural pattern, Lakehouse (CIDR 2021 paper), open platforms that unify data warehousing and advanced analytics. The new architecture will help address several major challenges, including data staleness, reliability, total cost of ownership, data lock-in, and limited use-case support. A critical part of realizing this vision is the next generation (decoupled) query engine and structured storage system that can outperform specialized data warehouses in relational query performance, yet retain the expressiveness and of general purpose systems such as Apache Spark™ to support diverse workloads ranging from ETL to data science. As part of this team, you will be working in one or more of the following areas to design and implement these next gen systems that leapfrog state-of-the-art: * Query compilation and optimization * Distributed query execution and scheduling * Vectorized execution engine * Data security * Resource management * Transaction coordination * Efficient storage structures (encodings, indexes) * Automatic physical data optimization What we look for: * A passion for database systems, storage systems, distributed systems, language design, or performance optimization * Experience working towards a multi-year vision with incremental deliverables * Motivated by delivering customer value and impact * 8+ years of experience working in a related system (preferred) * Optional: PhD in databases or distributed systems   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

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.