Staff Software Engineer (Compute)

Job Description:

DataRobot delivers AI that maximizes impact and minimizes business risk. Our platform and applications integrate into core business processes so teams can develop, deliver, and govern AI at scale. DataRobot empowers practitioners to deliver predictive and generative AI, and enables leaders to secure their AI assets. Organizations worldwide rely on DataRobot for AI that makes sense for their business — today and in the future. 

Our AI Compute team is the engine at the heart of DataRobot. We have a mission to build and operate the foundational computing backbone that powers all of DataRobot's AI products and our customers' most demanding workloads. This team works backwards from the needs of data scientists, ML engineers, and application developers to provide the raw power and sophisticated orchestration required to train, deploy, and manage agentic AI at any scale. We are the internal equivalent of a hyperscale cloud provider's core compute service, obsessed with performance, efficiency, and enabling the future of AI.

As a Staff Software Engineer in our AI Compute team, you’ll be a technical expert and a force multiplier. You’ll lead by example—rolling up your sleeves as a technical contributor to solve complex problems, shaping architecture, and mentoring engineers to do their best work and advance their careers. You’ll work across our control plane systems, influence cross-team roadmaps, and bring pragmatic engineering practices into how we build, test, and operate infrastructure software.

This role includes participation in an on-call rotation—we believe in shared ownership of our platform and aim to build systems that are resilient, observable, and require minimal intervention.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build a system that ensures micro-services are secure, performant, reliable, and can go from idea to production in an hour.

• Build a system that continuously provides recommendations to right-size computing resources for Kubernetes to ensure efficient cloud spending for ourselves and our customers.

• Design and architect automated quality platforms to go from Enterprise-Grade releases from once-a-quarter to once-a-week to once-per-day to once-per-hour without sacrificing performance, security, or reliability

• Work with Product, Legal and Security to ensure the continuous delivery processes you build are compliant and secure

• Work with the team to ensure pipelines have clear playbooks and can operate 24/7 without you

• Work with a diverse group of architects and platform engineers across our R&D department to set continuous delivery and performance requirements for all production services

• Work with internal product managers to set roadmaps and define milestones to deliver innovative and simple solutions to our many teams’ continuous delivery and platform engineering issues

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Expert proficiency in Kubernetes architecture and operations including resource management/scheduling, auto-scaling, Gateway API/Ingress, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry or experience with other orchestrators like nomad/slurm

• Experience with gpu clusters, either as a user or administrator or experience in multi-node AI/ML

• Passionate about developing products for your fellow internal developers.

• Experience setting technical direction, making architectural decisions, and driving consensus across multiple teams and stakeholders

• Able to influence others in the organization even where they lack explicit authority

• Proven track record for leading large-scale projects to completion across dozens of teams/Pods

• Experience mentoring senior engineers, fostering a positive team culture, and promoting continuous learning and improvement among colleagues

• Operational excellency to continuously define and improve SLA (Service Level Agreement) working backward from customer experience for all the software components this team manages.

Requisite Education and Experience / Minimum Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience

• Expert in developing a wide variety of software with Python (5+ years)

• Experience designing and operating diverse CI/CD pipelines with Harness.io

• Experience designing and innovating large-scale horizontal and vertically-scaled build, testing, and deployment systems for Kubernetes environments and familiarity with Helm charts

• Preferred:

  • Golang, Terraform and Terragrunt

  • Chronosphere

  • Multi-cloud experience (AWS, Azure, GCP, and OpenShift)

Nice to Have:

• Direct experience with modern distributed compute frameworks (e.g., Ray, Dask) and large-scale job schedulers (e.g., Slurm, Kueue).

• CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer) certification

• Publicly reviewable contributions to interesting development projects.

• Agentic AI experience

• Experience working with NVIDIA infrastructure in managing (NIM Operator, NVIDIA GPU Operator)

The talent and dedication of our employees are at the core of DataRobot’s journey to be an iconic company. We strive to attract and retain the best talent by providing competitive pay and benefits with our employees’ well-being at the core. Here’s what your benefits package may include depending on your location and local legal requirements: Medical, Dental & Vision Insurance, Flexible Time Off Program, Paid Holidays, Paid Parental Leave, Global Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and more!

DataRobot Operating Principles:

• Wow Our Customers
• Set High Standards
• Be Better Than Yesterday
• Be Rigorous
• Assume Positive Intent
• Have the Tough Conversations
• Be Better Together
• Debate, Decide, Commit
• Deliver Results
• Overcommunicate

Research shows that many women only apply to jobs when they meet 100% of the qualifications while many men apply to jobs when they meet 60%. At DataRobot we encourage ALL candidates, especially women, people of color, LGBTQ+ identifying people, differently abled, and other people from marginalized groups to apply to our jobs, even if you do not check every box. We’d love to have a conversation with you and see if you might be a great fit. 

DataRobot is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. DataRobot is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. Please see the United States Department of Labor’s EEO poster and EEO poster supplement for additional information.

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