Staff Software Engineer, Platform

Scale AI•Seattle, WA

About The Position

Software is eating the world, but AI is eating software. We live in unprecedented times – AI has the potential to exponentially augment human intelligence. Every person will have a personal tutor, coach, assistant, personal shopper, travel guide, and therapist throughout life. As the world adjusts to this new reality, leading platform companies are scrambling to build LLMs at billion scale, while large enterprises figure out how to add it to their products. To make them safe, aligned and actually useful, these models need human evaluation and reinforcement learning through human feedback (RLHF) during pre-training, fine-tuning, and production evaluations. This is the main innovation that’s enabled ChatGPT to get such a large headstart among competition. At Scale, our products include the Generative AI Data Engine, SGP, Donovan, and others that power the most advanced LLMs and generative models in the world through world-class RLHF, human data generation, model evaluation, safety, and alignment. The data we are producing is some of the most important work for how humanity will interact with AI. At the foundation of these products is the Platform Engineering team. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will define and drive both the architectural roadmap and implementation of core platforms and software systems. You will be responsible for providing high-level vision and driving adoption across the engineering org for orchestration, data abstraction, data pipelines, identity & access management, and underlying cloud infrastructure. You’ll also get widespread exposure to the forefront of the AI race as Scale sees it in enterprises, startups, governments, and large tech companies.

Requirements

8+ years of full-time engineering experience, post-graduation with specialities in back-end systems.
Extensive experience in software development and a deep understanding of distributed systems and public cloud platforms (AWS preferred).
Demonstrated a track record of independent ownership and leadership across successful multi-team engineering projects
Possess excellent communication and collaboration skills, and the ability to translate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
Experience working fluently with standard containerization & deployment technologies like Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, etc.
Experience with orchestration platforms, such as Temporal and AWS Step Functions.
Experience with NoSQL document databases (MongoDB) and structured databases (Postgres).
Strong knowledge of software engineering best practices and CI/CD tooling (CircleCI, ArgoCD).

Nice To Haves

Experience with data warehouses (Snowflake, Firebolt) and data pipeline/ETL tools (Dagster, dbt).
Experience scaling products at hyper-growth startups.
Excitement to work with AI technologies.

Responsibilities

Architectural Vision: You will drive the design and implementation of foundational systems, acting as a bridge between high-level business goals and technical goals.
Cross-Functional Leadership: You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to define and drive adoption of the next generation of features for our AI data infrastructure.
Technical Ownership: You are responsible for proactively identifying and driving opportunities for organizational growth, driving improvements in programming practices, and upgrading the tools that define our development lifecycle.
Technical Mentorship: You will serve as a subject matter expert, presenting technical information to stakeholders and providing the guidance to elevate the engineering culture across the company.