Staff Backend Software Engineer- (ai Platform)

Databricks Databricks · Data AI · Mountain View, CA · Engineering

Staff Backend Software Engineer for Databricks' AI Platform team, focusing on building and improving the infrastructure that powers AI offerings like MLflow, AI Gateway, Agent Framework, and Foundation Model APIs. The role involves improving reliability, latency, and efficiency of distributed AI workloads and collaborating with various teams to deliver seamless end-to-end AI experiences.

What you'd actually do

  1. Build infrastructure that powers our flagship offerings like MLflow, AI Gateway, Databricks Apps, Agent Framework, Agent Bricks, and Foundation Model APIs, to state a few.
  2. Improve reliability, latency, and efficiency of distributed AI workloads
  3. Collaborate with platform, infra, and ML teams to deliver seamless end-to-end experiences
  4. Shape how developers and data scientists build and interact with AI on Databricks

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years of experience in backend or infrastructure engineering
  • Strong programming skills in Scala, Go, or Python
  • Experience with distributed systems, scalable APIs, or cloud-native infrastructure
  • Familiarity with service-oriented architecture, deployment pipelines, and system observability
  • Strong product and ownership mindset

Nice to have

  • Experience with real-time serving, ML infrastructure, or GPU orchestration
  • Exposure to platforms like SageMaker, Vertex AI, or Azure ML
  • Contributions to OSS projects like MLflow, PyTorch, or Ray
  • Built developer platforms or internal tools supporting AI workflows

What the JD emphasized

  • high-agency, high-visibility team
  • frontier of AI infrastructure
  • deep ties to research, product, and real-world enterprise use cases
  • fastest-growing businesses
  • building the infrastructure that powers the next generation of AI

Other signals

  • AI infrastructure
  • model training
  • model serving
  • vector search
  • distributed AI workloads