Software Engineer 3 Palo Alto; Seattle

MongoDB; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading database platform provider is seeking a Software Engineer 3 to design and develop core systems for a multi-tenant inference platform integrated with their database service. The role emphasizes collaboration with AI engineers, optimizing performance in a cloud-native environment, and requires strong software engineering skills in languages like Go, Rust, Python, or C++. This position offers a hybrid work model based in Seattle or Palo Alto.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience building backend or infrastructure systems.
• Strong software engineering skills in languages such as Go, Rust, Python, or C++.
• Familiarity with ML model serving and inference runtimes.
• Familiar with ML model serving concepts and inference runtimes.

Responsibilities

• Design and build components of a multi-tenant inference platform integrated with MongoDB Atlas.
• Collaborate with AI engineers and researchers to productionize inference for embedding models.
• Improve performance, autoscaling, GPU utilization, and resource efficiency.
• Improve performance, autoscaling, GPU utilization, and resource efficiency in a cloud-native environment
• Work across product, infrastructure, and ML teams to ensure the inference platform meets the scale, reliability, and latency demands of Atlas users

Skills

Backend infrastructure systems

Software engineering in Go, Rust, Python, C++

Cloud-native architectures

Distributed systems

ML model serving concepts

Vector search systems (e.g., Faiss)

Collaboration across teams

Multi-tenant service design

Performance

Tools

vLLM

Kubernetes

Job description

We’re looking for a Software Engineer 3 to help build the next-generation inference platform that supports embedding models used for semantic search, retrieval, and AI-native experiences in MongoDB Atlas.

You’ll join the broader Search and AI Platform organization and collaborate with ML researchers and engineers from our Voyage.ai acquisition. Together, we’re building infrastructure for real-time, low-latency, and high-scale inference — fully integrated with Atlas and designed for developer-first experiences.

As a Software Engineer 3, you'll focus on building core systems and services that power model inference at scale. You'll own key components of the infrastructure, work across teams to ensure tight integration with Atlas, and contribute to a platform designed for reliability, performance, and ease of use.

This role is based in Palo Alto, CA or Seattle, WA with an in-office or hybrid work model.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build components of a multi-tenant inference platform integrated directly with MongoDB Atlas, supporting semantic search and hybrid retrieval
• Collaborate with AI engineers and researchers to productionize inference for embedding models and rerankers — enabling both batch and real-time use cases
  Contribute to platform capabilities such as latency-aware routing, model versioning, health monitoring, and observability
• Improve performance, autoscaling, GPU utilization, and resource efficiency in a cloud-native environment
• Work across product, infrastructure, and ML teams to ensure the inference platform meets the scale, reliability, and latency demands of Atlas users
• Gain hands-on experience with tools like vLLM and container orchestration with Kubernetes

Who You Are

• 2+ years of experience building backend or infrastructure systems at scale
• Strong software engineering skills in languages such as Go, Rust, Python, or C++, with an emphasis on performance and reliability
• Experienced in cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, and multi-tenant service design
• Familiar with concepts in ML model serving and inference runtimes, even if not directly deploying models
• Knowledge of vector search systems (e.g., Faiss, HNSW, ScaNN) is a plus
• Comfortable working across functional teams, including ML researchers, backend engineers, and platform teams
• Motivated to work on systems integrated into MongoDB Atlas and used by thousands of developers

Nice to Have

• Experience integrating infrastructure with production ML workloads
• Understanding of hybrid retrieval, prompt-driven systems, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure for ML serving or search

About MongoDB

MongoDB is built for change, empowering our customers and our people to innovate at the speed of the market. We have redefined the database for the AI era, enabling innovators to create, transform, and disrupt industries with software. MongoDB’s unified database platform—the most widely available, globally distributed database on the market—helps organizations modernize legacy workloads, embrace innovation, and unleash AI. Our cloud-native platform, MongoDB Atlas, is the only globally distributed, multi-cloud database and is available across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

With offices worldwide and nearly 60,000 customers—including 75% of the Fortune 100 and AI-native startups—relying on MongoDB for their most important applications, we’re powering the next era of software.

MongoDB is committed to providing any necessary accommodations for individuals with disabilities within our application and interview process. To request an accommodation due to a disability, please inform your recruiter.

MongoDB, Inc. provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type and makes all hiring decisions without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

MongoDB’s base salary range for this role in the U.S. is: