Staff Machine Learning Engineer

About the role

The Applied AI team at Databricks is at the forefront of advancing GenAI-powered products, having launched Databricks Assistant, AI/BI Genie, and Agent Bricks. These products serve hundreds of thousands of users daily, tackling challenges like code suggestion, error detection and correction, text-to-SQL generation, automatic pipeline generation, and knowledge QA. We are seeking multiple GenAI Engineers (junior to senior levels) to drive the next phase of development, focusing on enhancing LLM quality, expanding GenAI capabilities across Databricks products, and strengthening our platform architecture for seamless AI interactions at scale in 2025.

Responsibilities

• Shape the direction of applied AI areas and intelligence features in Databricks products.
• Drive the development and deployment of state-of-the-art AI models and systems that impact Databricks' products (e.g., Databricks Assistant and AI/BI Genie).
• Develop novel data collection, fine-tuning, and LLM technologies to achieve optimal performance on specific tasks and domains.
• Design and implement ML pipelines for data preprocessing, feature engineering, model training, hyperparameter tuning, and model evaluation to enable rapid experimentation.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including AI researchers, ML engineers, and product teams, to deliver impactful AI solutions that enhance user productivity and satisfaction.
• Build scalable, reusable backend systems to support GenAI products across the company.
• Develop robust logging, telemetry, and evaluation harnesses to ensure reliable model performance.

Requirements

• 2-8 years of machine learning engineering experience in high-velocity, high-growth companies, or a strong background in relevant ML research in academia.
• Strong track record working with language modeling technologies, including:
  • Developing generative and embedding techniques, modern model architectures, fine-tuning/pre-training datasets, and evaluation benchmarks.
• Proficiency in Python, TensorFlow/PyTorch, and scalable ML architectures.
• Ability to drive end-to-end model development, from research and prototyping to deployment and monitoring.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a passion for improving AI-driven user experiences.
• Strong coding and software engineering skills, including familiarity with testing, code reviews, and deployment principles.
• Experience with LLM fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a bonus.

Benefits

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

Pay

The pay range for this role is $190,000—$285,000 USD, based on factors such as job-related skills, depth of experience, relevant certifications, and work location. The total compensation package may also include eligibility for an annual performance bonus, equity, and benefits.

This position is open to employees working from our Mountain View, CA office.