Staff Backend Software Engineer

<p>P-1592</p> <p>At Databricks, we are passionate about enabling data and AI teams to solve the world's toughest problems, from making the next mode of transportation a reality to accelerating 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.</p> <p>As part of the Unity AI Gateway team, you'll build the control plane that every AI request at Databricks passes through: partner and self-hosted models, agents, coding assistants, and MCP servers. It enforces budgets, routes each request to the right model, and applies guardrails inline. Unity AI Gateway is one of our fastest-growing businesses, moving trillions of tokens per week for thousands of customers.</p> <h3><strong>The impact you will have:</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Build the routing layer that picks the right model for each request across quality, cost, latency, availability, and remaining budget</li> <li>Improve reliability, latency, and efficiency of distributed AI workloads</li> <li>Collaborate with research, platform, infra, and AI/ML teams to deliver seamless end-to-end experiences</li> <li>Shape how developers and data scientists build and interact with AI on Databricks</li> </ul> <h3><strong>What we look for:</strong></h3> <ul> <li>8+ years of experience in backend or infrastructure engineering</li> <li>Strong programming skills in <strong>Scala, or Go</strong></li> <li>Experience with distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, or cloud-native infrastructure</li> <li>Familiarity with service-oriented architecture, deployment pipelines, and system observability</li> <li>Strong product and ownership mindset. You