Staff AI Infra Engineer, Foundation Model Inference

Menlo Ventures; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 265,000; Full time

Job summary

Databricks is hiring across multiple AI Engineering teams to build the platforms and products that power data apps, AI agents, model training, model serving, and vector search. Join a high-agency team delivering scalable AI infrastructure for enterprise-scale workloads.

The FMAPI team will drive roadmap-to-execution work, collaborating with platform, infra, and ML groups to deliver end-to-end experiences for developers and data scientists building AI applications.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in backend or infrastructure engineering.
• Experience with distributed systems, scalable APIs, or cloud-native infrastructure.
• Strong product and ownership mindset, with a focus on shipping user-facing value.
• Experience with real-time serving, ML infrastructure, or GPU orchestration.
• Familiarity with service-oriented architecture, deployment pipelines, and system observability.
• Strong programming skills in Scala, Go, or Python.

Responsibilities

• Build LLM infrastructure powering large-scale inference workloads for customers through partner models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) and self-hosted models (Qwen, GPT-OSS, Llama)
• Shape the direction of the FMAPI product — from roadmap to execution — by leveraging deep customer empathy and direct engagement with enterprise users and model providers
• 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

Skills

Scala

Go

Python

Distributed systems

APIs design

Cloud-native

Tools

SageMaker

Vertex AI

Azure ML

Job description

Databricks is hiring across multiple AI Engineering teams to build the platforms and products that power data apps, AI agents, model training, model serving, and vector search. Join a high-agency team delivering scalable AI infrastructure for enterprise-scale workloads.

The FMAPI team will drive roadmap-to-execution work, collaborating with platform, infra, and ML groups to deliver end-to-end experiences for developers and data scientists building AI applications.