Databricks · 7 hours ago
Staff Software Engineer - GenAI inference
San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$191K/yr - $233K/yr
6+ years expDatabricks is the data and AI company that empowers over 10,000 organizations globally with its Data Intelligence Platform. The Staff Software Engineer for GenAI inference will lead the architecture and optimization of the inference engine, ensuring high performance and scalability while collaborating closely with researchers and cross-functional teams.
AnalyticsArtificial Intelligence (AI)Data StorageInformation TechnologyMachine Learning
Responsibilities
Own and drive the architecture, design, and implementation of the inference engine, and collaborate on model-serving stack optimized for large-scale LLMs inference
Partner closely with researchers to bring new model architectures or features (sparsity, activation compression, mixture-of-experts) into the engine
Lead the end-to-end optimization for latency, throughput, memory efficiency, and hardware utilization across GPUs, and accelerators
Define and guide standards to build and maintain instrumentation, profiling, and tracing tooling to uncover bottlenecks and guide optimizations
Architect scalable routing, batching, scheduling, memory management, and dynamic loading mechanisms for inference workloads
Ensure reliability, reproducibility, and fault tolerance in the inference pipelines, including A/B launches, rollback, and model versioning
Collaborate cross-functionally on Integrating with federated, distributed inference infrastructure – orchestrate across nodes, balance load, handle communication overhead
Drive cross-team collaboration: with platform engineers, cloud infrastructure, and security/compliance teams
Represent the team externally through benchmarks, whitepapers, and open-source contributions
Qualification
Required
BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, or a related field
Strong software engineering background (6+ years or equivalent) in performance-critical systems
Proven track record of owning complex system components and driving architectural decisions end-to-end
Deep understanding of ML inference internals: attention, MLPs, recurrent modules, quantization, sparse operations, etc
Hands-on experience with CUDA, GPU programming, and key libraries (cuBLAS, cuDNN, NCCL, etc.)
Strong background in distributed systems design, including RPC frameworks, queuing, RPC batching, sharding, memory partitioning
Demonstrated ability to uncover and solve performance bottlenecks across layers (kernel, memory, networking, scheduler)
Experience building instrumentation, tracing, and profiling tools for ML models
Ability to lead through influence - work closely with ML researchers, translate novel model ideas into production systems
Excellent communication and leadership skills, with a proactive and ownership-driven mindset
Preferred
Bonus: published research or open-source contributions in ML systems, inference optimization, or model serving
Benefits
Eligibility for annual performance bonus
Equity
Company
Databricks
Databricks is a data and AI platform that unifies data engineering, analytics, and machine learning on a lakehouse architecture.
5001-10000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Databricks has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (385)
2024 (319)
2023 (227)
2022 (222)
2021 (166)
2020 (64)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$25.81BKey Investors
Counterpoint GlobalFranklin TempletonAndreessen Horowitz
2025-12-16Series Unknown· $4B
2025-09-08Series Unknown· $1B
2025-01-13Debt Financing· $5.25B
Leadership Team
Ali Ghodsi
CEO and Co-founder
David Conte
Chief Financial Officer
Recent News
2025-12-29
globalventuring.com
2025-12-27
2025-12-26
Company data provided by crunchbase