Staff Software Engineer, Foundational Model Serving
Designs and builds scalable, low-latency systems for serving frontier AI models on GPUs. Requires 10+ years in large-scale distributed systems, strong system design skills, and leadership in operational excellence; no prior AI experience needed.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Design and implement core systems and APIs for Databricks Foundation Model Serving, ensuring scalability, reliability, and operational excellence.
- Partner with product and engineering leadership to define technical roadmap and long-term architecture for serving workloads.
- Drive architectural decisions to optimize performance, throughput, autoscaling, and efficiency for GPU serving workloads.
- Contribute to key components like vLLM, SGLang, token-based rate limiters, and optimizers.
- Collaborate with product, platform, and research teams to translate customer needs into reliable systems.
- Establish best practices for code quality, testing, operational readiness, and mentor engineers.
- Represent the team in cross-organizational discussions and influence AI platform strategy.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
- Experience leading high-scale, operationally sensitive backend systems.
- Track record of up-leveling team engineering excellence.
- Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and system design for large-scale, low-latency serving systems.
- Proven ability to deliver complex, high-impact initiatives with measurable value.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills in fast-moving environments.
- Strategic, product-oriented mindset aligning technical execution with vision.
- Passion for mentoring and fostering technical excellence.
Skills
vLLM, Sglang, Kubernetes, Distributed Systems, System Design, APIs, GPU, Rate Limiting, Autoscaling, Algorithms
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