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Staff Software Engineer - AI Research Infrastructure

Databricks· Engineering
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Hybrid (New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA)$199k - $270kfull-timePosted 5mo ago

About the role

Staff Software Engineer role focusing on AI Research Infrastructure to design, build, and operate the research stack powering Databricks AI Research, enabling large-scale experiment workloads across GPUs with reliable tooling, scheduling, and observability.

Responsibilities

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

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.
  • 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 (e.g., C++, Rust, Go, Java, Scala) and ability to design, implement, and debug complex services.
  • Built or significantly contributed to cluster schedulers, resource managers, or large‑scale job orchestration systems (e.g., Kubernetes, Slurm, Ray, custom internal systems).
  • Understanding of modern ML training and inference workflows (e.g., distributed training, model parallelism, fine‑tuning, evaluation).
  • Ability to move fast with operational excellence, taking complex systems from prototype to stable ownership.
  • Strong communication skills to translate research needs into infra realities.

Skills

Required:Distributed systems design and operationSystems programmingCluster scheduling / resource management

Benefits

  • Comprehensive benefits package (region-specific details available)
  • Pay transparency and potential for annual performance bonus, equity, and other benefits.
Last updated Sep 10, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Databricks

Leading Data and AI Platform for Enterprises

Databricks offers a unified platform for data, analytics and AI. Build better AI with a data-centric approach. Simplify ETL, data warehousing, governance and AI on the Data Intelligence Platform.

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