Sr Software Engineer - Large Language Models

While candidates in the listed locations are encouraged for this role, candidates in other locations will be considered.

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. Founded by engineers — and customer-obsessed — we leap at every opportunity to solve technical challenges, from designing next-gen UI/UX for interfacing with data to scaling our services and infrastructure across millions of virtual machines. And we're only getting started.

As an engineer working on large language models (LLM) at Databricks, you’ll work closely with the teams behind Databricks’ Dolly LLM to build intelligent systems to democratize AI across a wide range of industries, from healthcare to energy, finance to government.  Our teams work on some of the hardest, most interesting problems facing the business, ranging from designing large-scale distributed AI/ML systems, to optimizing distributed GPU model serving or developing novel modeling methodologies that scale to production use cases. Our work is necessarily cross-functional, and successful individuals on our team embody an unusually high degree of empathy and ownership, demonstrating an intuitive ability to understand how individual technical decisions shape Databricks’ business strategy.

Databricks has a long-standing commitment to research and open source, and though our teams are focused first and foremost on business impact, we work hard to foster a creative, intellectually stimulating environment featuring visiting speakers, academic partnerships, and industrial collaborations.

The impact you'll have:

Engineers working on LLMs may specialize in different areas. Below are examples of the kinds of activities that different members of our teams perform on a daily basis.

• Drive the development and deployment of state-of-the-art AI models and systems that directly impact the capabilities and performance of Databricks' products and services.
• Architect and implement robust, scalable ML infrastructure, including data storage, processing, and model serving components, to support seamless integration of AI/ML models into production environments.
• Develop novel data collection, fine-tuning, and pre-training strategies that achieve optimal performance on specific tasks and domains.
• Design and implement automated ML pipelines for data preprocessing, feature engineering, model training, hyperparameter tuning, and model evaluation, enabling rapid experimentation and iteration.
• Implement advanced model compression and optimization techniques to reduce the resource footprint of language models while preserving their performance.
• Collaborate with product managers and cross-functional teams to drive technology-first initiatives that enable novel business strategies and product roadmaps.
• Contribute to the broader AI community by publishing research, presenting at conferences, and actively participating in open-source projects, enhancing Databricks' reputation as an industry leader.

What we look for:

• BS+ (M.S. or PhD preferred) in Computer Science, or a related field.
• 2+ years experience developing AI/ML systems at scale in production or in high-impact research environments.
• Strong track record of working with language modeling technologies. This could include either:
• Developing generative and embedding techniques, modern model architectures, fine tuning / pre-training datasets, and evaluation benchmarks.
• Experience deploying and scaling language models in production; deep understanding of the unique infrastructure challenges posed by training and serving LLMs.
• Strong understanding of computer science fundamentals.
• Contributions to well-used open-source projects.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health coverage including medical, dental, and vision
• 401(k) Plan
• Equity awards
• Flexible time off
• Paid parental leave
• Family Planning
• Gym reimbursement
• Annual personal development fund
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)