Staff Software Engineer - AI Research Infrastructure

Role overview

Responsibilities

• check_circle Design and implement infrastructure that supports large‑scale experiments, data processing, and model training (e.g., HPC clusters, GPU fleets, or cloud‑based systems)
• check_circle Enable researchers to go from idea to large‑scale experiment in minutes, not days, by building powerful abstractions for job submission, scheduling, and monitoring.
• check_circle Create tooling that improves research developer productivity, such as experiment management systems, CI/testing infrastructure for research code, and workflows that reduce iteration time.
• check_circle Influence the long‑term roadmap for research computation, shaping how Databricks AI Research train, evaluate, and ship models to customers.
• check_circle Serve as a technical mentor and force multiplier for other engineers working on compute, infra, and AI systems.

Basic qualifications

• BS/MS or PhD in Computer Science or related field
• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial time working on large‑scale distributed systems or infrastructure.
• Have deep experience with building and operating distributed systems, data pipelines, or large‑scale backend services, ideally involving GPUs, clusters, or major cloud providers.
• Are proficient in one or more systems programming languages (e.g., C++, Rust, Go, Java, Scala) and can design, implement, and debug complex services.
• Have built or significantly contributed to cluster schedulers, resource managers, or large‑scale job orchestration systems (e.g., Kubernetes, Slurm, Ray, custom internal systems).
• Understand modern ML training and inference workflows (e.g., distributed training, model parallelism, fine‑tuning, evaluation), even if you’re not primarily a research scientist.
• Can move fast and be pragmatic in getting things done, while caring about operational excellence. Have driven complex systems from prototype to stable, well‑owned services.
• Communicate clearly with both researchers and engineers, and enjoy translating between research needs and infra realities.

Benefits

• check_circle At Databricks, we strive to provide comprehensive benefits and perks that meet the needs of all of our employees.

About the company