Staff Backend Software Engineer

Databricks
San Francisco, USA2026-03-18

About the job

As part of the AI Platform team, you’ll build the substrate that powers everything from data apps, AI agents, model training, model serving, and Vector Search. You’ll be joining a high-agency, high-visibility team operating at the frontier of AI infrastructure — with deep ties to research, product, and real-world enterprise use cases. Databricks Mosaic AI is one of our fastest-growing businesses, helping thousands of our customers democratize AI within their organizations. We’re building the infrastructure that powers the next generation of AI.

Responsibilities

Build LLM infrastructure powering trillions of tokens per week for customers through partner models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) and self hosted models (Qwen, GPT-OSS, Llama)

Improve reliability, latency, and efficiency of distributed AI workloads

Collaborate with platform, infra, and ML teams to deliver seamless end-to-end experiences

Shape how developers and data scientists build and interact with AI on Databricks

Qualifications

Minimum

8+ years of experience in backend or infrastructure engineering

Strong programming skills in Scala, Go, or Python

Experience with distributed systems, scalable APIs, or cloud-native infrastructure

Familiarity with service-oriented architecture, deployment pipelines, and system observability

Strong product and ownership mindset — you care about building the right solution, not just any solution

Preferred

Experience with real-time serving, ML infrastructure, or GPU orchestration

Exposure to platforms like SageMaker, Vertex AI, or Azure ML

Contributions to OSS projects like MLflow, PyTorch, Ray, vLLM, SGLang

Built developer platforms or internal tools supporting AI workflows