Staff Software Engineer - GenAI inference

As a staff software engineer for GenAI inference, you will lead the architecture, development, and optimisation of the inference engine that powers Databricks Foundation Model API.

You’ll bridge research advances and production demands, ensuring high throughput, low latency, and robust scaling.

Your work will encompass the full GenAI inference stack: kernels, runtimes, orchestration, memory, and integration with frameworks and orchestration systems.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive the architecture, design, and implementation of the inference engine, and collaborate on model-serving stack optimised for large-scale LLMs inference
• Partner closely with researchers to bring new model architectures or features into the engine
• Lead the end-to-end optimisation for latency, throughput, memory efficiency, and hardware utilisation across GPUs and accelerators
• Define and guide standards to build and maintain instrumentation, profiling, and tracing tooling to uncover bottlenecks and guide optimisations
• Architect scalable routing, batching, scheduling, memory management, and dynamic loading mechanisms for inference workloads
• Ensure reliability, reproducibility, and fault tolerance in the inference pipelines
• Collaborate cross-functionally on integrating with federated, distributed inference infrastructure
• Drive cross-team collaboration with platform engineers, cloud infrastructure, and security/compliance teams
• Represent the team externally through benchmarks, whitepapers, and open-source contributions

Requirements

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, or a related field
• Strong software engineering background in performance-critical systems
• Proven track record of owning complex system components and driving architectural decisions end-to-end
• Deep understanding of ML inference internals
• Hands-on experience with CUDA, GPU programming, and key libraries
• Strong background in distributed systems design
• Demonstrated ability to uncover and solve performance bottlenecks across layers
• Experience building instrumentation, tracing, and profiling tools for ML models
• Ability to lead through influence and excellent communication and leadership skills

Pay Range Transparency

The pay range for this role is $190,900-$232,800 USD.

Benefits

At Databricks, we strive to provide comprehensive benefits and perks that meet the needs of all of our employees.