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Staff Software Engineer, AI Runtime

Databricks· Engineering
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Hybrid (Mountain View, CA; San Francisco, CA)$190k - $265kfull-timePosted 4mo ago

About the role

Staff Software Engineer responsible for major parts of AI Runtime architecture, reliability, developer experience, and multi-node training problems, driving technical direction and collaboration across teams.

Responsibilities

  • Drive major parts of AI Runtime's architecture and help shape Databricks' long-term technical direction in AI training infrastructure.
  • Design the reliability and observability systems for a fleet that keeps growing in scale and complexity.
  • Lead improvements to AI Runtime's developer experience for people and agents, so even the largest training jobs feel as simple as a first experiment.
  • Help choose the technical bets that prepare AI Runtime for new GPU generations and workload types.
  • Take on the hardest multi-node training problems yourself, from orchestration and GPU scheduling to data loading and checkpointing.
  • Make training faster and cheaper by raising efficiency across model architectures and GPU accelerators.
  • Work with research, product, and customers to shape what we build next and lead projects across teams.
  • Champion engineering excellence, raise the bar, and mentor the engineers around you.

Qualifications

  • 10+ years 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, such as checkpointing, failure detection, and automatic recovery.
  • Background in building and running multi-tenant cloud platforms as products.
  • Track record of leading technical projects across teams and seeing them through to customer impact.
  • Clarity to bring teams to agreement on technical designs, and a reputation as a mentor other engineers seek out.
  • BS in Computer Science or a related field (MS or PhD preferred).

Skills

Required:Distributed systemsGPU trainingParallelism strategiesGPU performanceCheckpointing / resilience
Nice to have:Cloud platforms

Benefits

  • For specific details on the benefits offered in your region click here.
Last updated Oct 22, 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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