About the job
As a software engineer for GenAI inference, you will help design, develop, and optimize the inference engine that powers Databricks’ Foundation Model API. You’ll work at the intersection of research and production, ensuring our large language model (LLM) serving systems are fast, scalable, and efficient. Your work will touch the full GenAI inference stack — from kernels and runtimes to orchestration and memory management.
Responsibilities
Contribute to the design and implementation of the inference engine, and collaborate on model-serving stack optimized for large-scale LLMs inference
Collaborate with researchers to bring new model architectures or features (sparsity, activation compression, mixture-of-experts) into the engine
Optimize for latency, throughput, memory efficiency, and hardware utilization across GPUs, and accelerators
Build and maintain instrumentation, profiling, and tracing tooling to uncover bottlenecks and guide optimizations
Develop and enhance scalable routing, batching, scheduling, memory management, and dynamic loading mechanisms for inference workloads
Support reliability, reproducibility, and fault tolerance in the inference pipelines, including A/B launches, rollback, and model versioning
Integrate with federated, distributed inference infrastructure – orchestrate across nodes, balance load, handle communication overhead
Collaborate cross-functionally: with platform engineers, cloud infrastructure, and security/compliance teams
Document and share learnings, contributing to internal best practices and open-source efforts when possible
Qualifications
Minimum
BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, or a related field
Strong software engineering background (3+ years or equivalent) in performance-critical systems
Solid 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.)
Comfortable designing and operating distributed systems, 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 work closely with ML researchers, translate novel model ideas into production systems
Ownership mindset and eagerness to dive deep into complex system challenges
Preferred
Bonus: published research or open-source contributions in ML systems, inference optimization, or model serving