Staff Software Engineer - AI Research Infrastructure

Location: New York City, New York, or San Francisco, California

Salary: $199,000–$270,000 USD annually

Company

Databricks is a data and AI company building a unified platform for data, analytics, AI applications, and agents.

What you will do

• Design and build infrastructure for large-scale experiments, data processing, and model training across GPU fleets, HPC clusters, and cloud systems.
• Develop services for job submission, scheduling, orchestration, monitoring, and observability of training and inference workloads.
• Create experiment management, CI/testing, and developer tooling that improves research iteration speed.
• Turn experimental workloads into reliable, repeatable pipelines in partnership with research scientists, ML engineers, and platform teams.
• Shape the long-term roadmap for research computation and how models are trained, evaluated, and shipped.
• Mentor engineers working on compute, infrastructure, and AI systems.

Requirements

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field.
• 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.
• Experience with cluster schedulers, resource managers, or 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.

Culture & Benefits

• Work with research scientists, ML engineers, and platform teams to advance AI infrastructure.
• Benefits and perks are provided according to the employee’s region.
• Inclusive hiring practices and an environment designed to support diverse employees.
• Compensation may also include an annual performance bonus, equity, and regional benefits.