Staff Engineer, Foundation Models & AI Infrastructure

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

Job summary

Databricks is seeking a senior backend/infrastructure engineer to power the FMAPI product and advanced AI platforms. You will influence roadmap, contribute to scalable APIs, and collaborate across platform, infra, and ML teams to deliver reliable services at scale.

You will work on real-time serving, ML infrastructure, and GPU orchestration, partnering with OpenAI, Gemini, and other providers while shaping the future of data apps and AI workloads for thousands of customers.

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 and self-hosted models.
• 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

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

APIs

Real-time inference

Scala/Go/Python

System observability

Tools

Scala

Go

Python

Job description

Databricks is seeking a senior backend/infrastructure engineer to power the FMAPI product and advanced AI platforms. You will influence roadmap, contribute to scalable APIs, and collaborate across platform, infra, and ML teams to deliver reliable services at scale.

You will work on real-time serving, ML infrastructure, and GPU orchestration, partnering with OpenAI, Gemini, and other providers while shaping the future of data apps and AI workloads for thousands of customers.