Senior Staff Software Engineer (AI Runtime)

Location: Mountain View, California or San Francisco, California

Salary: $228,600–$342,800 USD annually

Company

Databricks is a Data and AI company providing a unified platform for data, AI applications, analytics, and agents to more than 20,000 organizations worldwide.

What you will do

• Drive the architecture and long-term technical direction of AI Runtime, a serverless platform for GPU model training.
• Define reliability and observability strategies for a growing, complex fleet.
• Improve the developer experience for people and AI agents running large training jobs.
• Lead work on multi-node training, including orchestration, GPU scheduling, data loading, checkpointing, and automatic recovery.
• Increase training speed and cost efficiency across model architectures and GPU accelerators.
• Collaborate with research, product, and customers; align teams on technical decisions and mentor engineers.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience in large-scale distributed systems, with significant depth in GPU training, high-performance computing, or ML systems.
• Hands-on experience training large models with FSDP, DeepSpeed, or Megatron, and fluency in parallelism strategies.
• Expertise in GPU performance, including accelerator architecture, high-speed interconnects, and kernels.
• Strong understanding of training resilience patterns, including checkpointing, failure detection, and automatic recovery.
• Experience building and operating multi-tenant cloud platforms as products.
• Track record of setting technical direction across teams and delivering business impact.
• Ability to align teams on difficult trade-offs and credibility as a mentor for senior engineers.
• BS in Computer Science or a related field.

Nice to have

• MS or PhD in Computer Science or a related field.

Culture & Benefits

• Inclusive culture focused on helping people excel.
• Comprehensive employee benefits and region-specific perks.
• Annual performance bonus and equity may be included in the total compensation package.
• Equal employment opportunity practices and consideration without regard to protected characteristics.