Principal Software Engineer

Job Description

Data Robot delivers AI that maximizes impact and minimizes business risk. Our platform and applications integrate into core business processes, allowing teams to develop, deliver, and govern AI at scale.

• You will help design, develop, and optimize the inference engine that powers Data Robot's agentic infrastructure API, ensuring large language model (LLM) serving systems are fast, scalable, and efficient. Your work will touch the full GenAI inference stack—from kernels and runtimes to orchestration and memory management.
• Contribute to the design and implementation of the inference engine, and collaborate on model‑serving stack optimized for large‑scale LLM inference.
• Collaborate with partners such as NVIDIA to bring new model architectures or features (sparsity, activation compression, mixture‑of‑experts) into the engine.
• Optimize for latency, throughput, memory efficiency, and hardware utilization across GPUs and accelerators.
• Build and maintain instrumentation, profiling, and tracing tooling to uncover bottlenecks and guide optimizations.
• Develop and enhance scalable routing, batching, scheduling, memory management, and dynamic loading mechanisms for inference workloads.
• Integrate with federated, distributed inference infrastructure—orchestrate across nodes, balance load, handle communication overhead.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally with platform engineers, cloud infrastructure, and security/compliance teams.
• Document and share learnings, contributing to internal best practices and open‑source efforts when possible.

• 10+ years of engineering experience, with at least 5+ in infrastructure, platform, or backend systems roles.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes internals and operations, including networking, scheduling, scaling, and controller patterns.
• Proven ability to design and build systems from scratch, making pragmatic trade‑offs along the way.
• Strong proficiency in modern programming languages such as Python or Go. Experience building production‑quality, reliable, and observable systems that are used across engineering organizations.
• A growth‑oriented mindset—driven to teach, learn, and improve systems as well as people.
• Experience operating across multiple cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and/or hybrid environments.
• Strong experience with Helm, container orchestration patterns, and CI/CD automation.
• Comfortable working with IaC (Terraform, Pulumi) and Git Ops workflows.
• Ability to influence without authority and align diverse stakeholders around technical decisions.

• Familiarity with Cilium, Kyverno, KEDA, Gateway API, OPA, or similar technologies.
• Experience building and running multi‑tenant SaaS platforms.
• Exposure to on‑prem delivery models or regulated environments.
• Experience with performance tuning for large‑scale data or compute workloads.
• Past success driving infrastructure transformation or decomposing legacy systems.
• Experience working with GPU infrastructure for training and inference.

The talent and dedication of our employees are at the core of Data Robot’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. Depending on location and local legal requirements, benefits may include medical, dental, and vision insurance; a flexible time‑off program;

paid holidays; paid parental leave; a global employee assistance program (EAP), and more.

All Data Robot hires are required to complete a background check prior to starting employment, which includes identity verification, criminal history check, employment verification and education verification. All employees must be available to attend in‑person company trainings and meetings.

Data Robot is a proud 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. Data Robot is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities.

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