Senior Software Engineer, Model Serving at Databricks Inc.

At Databricks, we are passionate about enabling data teams to solve the world's toughest problems - from making the next mode of transportation a reality to accelerating the development of medical breakthroughs. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform so our customers can use deep data insights to improve their business.

Databricks' Model Serving product provides enterprises with a unified, scalable, and governed platform to deploy and manage AI/ML models - from traditional ML to fine-tuned and proprietary large language models. It offers real-time, low-latency inference, governance, monitoring, and lineage. As AI adoption accelerates, Model Serving is a core pillar of the Databricks platform, enabling customers to operationalize models at scale with strong SLAs and cost efficiency.

As a Senior Engineer, you'll play a critical role in shaping both the product experience and the foundational infrastructure of Model Serving. You will design and build systems that enable high-throughput, low-latency inference across CPU and GPU workloads, influence architectural direction, and collaborate closely across platform, product, infrastructure, and research teams to deliver a world-class serving platform.

• Design and implement core systems and APIs that power Databricks Model Serving, ensuring scalability, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Drive architectural decisions and trade-offs to optimize performance, throughput, autoscaling, and operational efficiency for CPU and GPU serving workloads.
• Contribute directly to key components across the serving infrastructure - from model container builds and deployment workflows to runtime systems like routing, caching, observability, and intelligent autoscaling - ensuring smooth and efficient operations at scale.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, platform, and research teams to translate customer needs into reliable and performant systems.
• Lead technical initiatives that improve latency, availability, and cost-effectiveness across both customer-facing and foundational serving layers.
• Establish best practices for code quality, testing, and operational readiness, and mentor other engineers through design reviews and technical guidance.

• 5+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience in model serving, inference systems, or related infrastructure (e.g., routing, scheduling, autoscaling, and observability).
• Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and system design as applied to large-scale, low-latency serving systems.
• Proven ability to deliver technically complex, high-impact initiatives that create measurable customer or business value.
• Experience building architecture for large-scale, performance-sensitive CPU/GPU inference systems.
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across teams in fast-moving environments.
• Customer-focused mindset with the ability to align implementation details with product goals.
• Passion for mentoring, growing engineers, and fostering technical excellence.

Local Pay Range

$166,000 - $225,000 USD

Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 10,000 organizations worldwide - including Comcast, Condé Nast, Grammarly, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 - rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify and democratize data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark , Delta Lake and MLflow. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

At Databricks, we strive to provide comprehensive benefits and perks that meet the needs of all of our employees. For specific details on the benefits offered in your region, please visit

At Databricks, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can excel. We take great care to ensure that our hiring practices are inclusive and meet equal employment opportunity standards. Individuals looking for employment at Databricks are considered without regard to age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other protected characteristics.

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