Staff Software Engineer, Foundational Model Serving jobs in United States
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Databricks · 2 weeks ago

Staff Software Engineer, Foundational Model Serving

Databricks is a data and AI company focused on enabling data teams to solve complex problems through their infrastructure platform. The Staff Engineer will design and build systems for high-throughput, low-latency inference on GPU workloads, collaborating across teams to deliver a world-class foundation model API product.

AnalyticsArtificial Intelligence (AI)Data StorageInformation TechnologyMachine Learning
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Growth Opportunities
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H1B Sponsor Likelynote

Responsibilities

Design and implement core systems and APIs that power Databricks Foundation Model Serving, ensuring scalability, reliability, and operational excellence
Partner with product and engineering leadership to define the technical roadmap and long-term architecture for serving workloads
Drive architectural decisions and trade-offs to optimize performance, throughput, autoscaling, and operational efficiency for GPU serving workloads
Contribute directly to key components across the serving infrastructure — from working in systems like vLLM and SGLang to creating token based rate limiters and optimizers — ensuring smooth and efficient operations at scale
Collaborate cross-functionally with product, platform, and research teams to translate customer needs into reliable and performant systems
Establish best practices for code quality, testing, and operational readiness, and mentor other engineers through design reviews and technical guidance
Represent the team in cross-organizational technical discussions and influence Databricks’ broader AI platform strategy

Qualification

Large-scale distributed systemsBackend systems leadershipAlgorithmsData structuresLow-latency serving systemsGPU workloadsMentoring engineersCommunication skillsStrategic mindset

Required

10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems
Experience leading high-scale operationally sensitive backend systems
A track record of up-leveling teams engineering excellence
Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and system design as applied to large-scale, low-latency serving systems
Proven ability to deliver technically complex, high-impact initiatives that create measurable customer or business value
Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across teams in fast-moving environments
Strategic and product-oriented mindset with the ability to align technical execution with long-term vision
Passion for mentoring, growing engineers, and fostering technical excellence

Benefits

Annual performance bonus
Equity

Company

Databricks

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Databricks is a data and AI platform that unifies data engineering, analytics, and machine learning on a lakehouse architecture.

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 Stage
Total Funding
$25.81B
Key Investors
Counterpoint GlobalFranklin TempletonAndreessen Horowitz
2025-12-16Series Unknown· $4B
2025-09-08Series Unknown· $1B
2025-01-13Debt Financing· $5.25B

Leadership Team

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Ali Ghodsi
CEO and Co-founder
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David Conte
Chief Financial Officer
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Company data provided by crunchbase