Senior ML/AI Backline Engineer

Databricks Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 235,000 - 352,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

Equity

Benefits

Job summary

Databricks Inc. is seeking a Staff Backline Engineer in San Francisco to serve as a senior escalation point for complex ML/AI issues.

You will work across Support, Engineering, Product, and customers to diagnose root causes and drive them to resolution. You will investigate using logs, traces, and performance data; reproduce issues with Python/Spark, optimize resource usage, and help improve diagnostics, tooling, and platform reliability.

Qualifications

• Deep troubleshooting experience with distributed ML/AI systems.
• Strong Python experience with building, modifying, and debugging ML workloads.
• Experience with ML/DL frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-Learn).
• Familiarity with Databricks ML/AI technologies (MLflow, Model Serving, Spark MLlib).

Responsibilities

• Serve as a senior escalation point for complex ML/AI issues involving model training, inference, Model Serving, MLflow, Feature Engineering, with knowledge of Spark, Delta Lake, and distributed workloads.
• Perform deep technical investigations using logs, traces, metrics, profiling, configuration, source code, and customer workloads to identify root cause.
• Reproduce customer issues through hands‑on experimentation, Python/Spark development, workload construction, configuration changes, and performance analysis.
• Troubleshoot model training and inference failures, performance degradation, resource utilization, memory/CPU/GPU issues, distributed execution problems, and deployment/runtime failures.
• Partner closely with Engineering and Product teams to drive difficult issues to resolution and influence product improvements.
• Identify recurring failure patterns and turn them into better diagnostics, documentation, tooling, automation, and Claude skill capabilities.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical troubleshooting capabilities of the broader Support organization.
• Act as a technical SME for ML/AI platform areas and contribute to cross‑functional initiatives with global impact.

Skills

Distributed ML/AI systems

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Scikit-learn

Model Serving

Spark MLlib

Databricks ML/AI technologies

Technical communication

Root cause analysis

Tools

MLflow

Kubernetes

Job description

Databricks Inc. is seeking a Staff Backline Engineer in San Francisco to serve as a senior escalation point for complex ML/AI issues.

You will work across Support, Engineering, Product, and customers to diagnose root causes and drive them to resolution. You will investigate using logs, traces, and performance data; reproduce issues with Python/Spark, optimize resource usage, and help improve diagnostics, tooling, and platform reliability.