Staff Backend Software Engineer- (AI Platform)
Databricks · San Francisco, California · Engineering · listed March 31, 2026
The shape of it
Seniority
Staff
Experience asked
5+ years
Where
Not stated
Stated pay
$166,000 – $225,000 USD
Requirements listed
5
Length
726 words
In the posting’s own words
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.
What it asks for · 5
- 5+ 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
Also a plus
- 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, or Ray
- Built developer platforms or internal tools supporting AI workflows
What the job covers
- Build infrastructure that powers our flagship offerings like MLflow, AI Gateway, Databricks Apps, Agent Framework, Agent Bricks, and Foundation Model APIs, to state a few.
- 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
Tools and skills named
Models & research
- Machine learning3×
- GPU
- PyTorch
Data
- Databricks4×
Cloud & infra
- Azure
- Distributed systems
- Observability
Languages
- Go
- Python
- Scala
Product & design
- User experience
Words the posting leans on
- infrastructure8×
- data6×
- platform5×
- experience4×
- agent3×
- build3×
- building3×
- customers3×
- model3×
- powers3×
- apis2×
- apps2×
- deep2×
- developer2×
- distributed2×
- engineering2×
Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.
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