Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

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. In this

role, you will lead the design and development of core data storage, streaming,

caching, and indexing platforms and underlying systems. 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.

You will:

* Drive the architecture, design, implementation, and reliability of our

foundational data platforms and systems, working closely with stakeholders

and internal customers to understand and refine requirements.

* Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define, design, and deliver new

features.

* Proactively identify opportunities for, and driving improvements to, current

programming practices, including process enhancements and tool upgrades.

* Present technical information to teams and stakeholders, providing guidance

and insight on development processes and technologies.

* Provide technical leadership, including: upholding and upleveling engineering

standards across the organization, mentoring junior engineers.

Ideally you’d have:

* 8+ years of full-time engineering experience, post-graduation with

specialties in back-end systems, specifically related to building large-scale

data storage, streaming, and warehousing systems.

* Extensive experience in various database technologies (MongoDB, Postgres),

streaming/processing solutions (Kinesis, Flink, Spark), indexing/caching

(ElasticSearch, Redis), and various data query engines (Trino, Presto,

Snowflake, etc.).

* Show a track record of mentoring and leading teams in successful 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 and various public cloud offerings.

* Extensive experience in software development and a deep understanding of

distributed systems, cloud platforms and data systems.

* Experience driving cross functional collaboration and communication at an

organizational or broader level.

Nice to haves:

* Strong knowledge of software engineering best practices and CI/CD tooling

(CircleCI).

* Experience with performance tuning and cost optimizations of cloud based data

platforms.

* Experience defining a data lifecycle strategy and designing/implementing

tooling for data privacy (i.e. GDPR) needs.

* Experience scaling products at hyper-growth startups.

* Excitement to work with AI technologies.

Compensation

packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity,

and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and

maximum target for new hire salaries for the position and may be inclusive of

several career levels at Scale; it will be determined during the interview

process based on work location and additional factors, including job-related

skills, experience, qualifications, interview performance, and relevant

education or training. Scale employees in eligible roles are also granted equity

based compensation, subject to Board of Director approval. Your recruiter can

share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during

the hiring process, and confirm whether the hired role will be eligible for

equity grant. You'll also receive benefits including, but not limited to:

comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, a

learning and development stipend, and generous PTO. Additionally, this role may

be eligible for additional benefits such as a commuter stipend.

Please reference the job posting's subtitle for where this position will be

located. For pay transparency purposes, the base salary range for this full-time

position in the locations of San Francisco, New York, Seattle is:

$252,000—$315,000 USD

PLEASE NOTE: Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering

candidates for the same role. This allows us to ensure a fair and thorough

evaluation of all applicants.

About Us:

At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most

important decisions. Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack

technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and

governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact.

We work closely with industry leaders like Meta, Ernst & Young, Mayo Clinic,

Time Inc., the Government of Qatar, and U.S. government agencies including the

Army and Air Force. We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of

AI applications.

We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work,

which is why we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We

are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color,

ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship,

marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to

applicants with physical and mental disabilities. If you need assistance and/or

a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a

disability, please contact us at [email protected]. Please see the United

States Department of Labor's Know Your Rights poster

[https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/2023-06/22-088_EEOC_KnowYourRights6.12ScreenRdr.pdf]

for additional information.

We comply with the United States Department of Labor's Pay Transparency

provision.

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business purposes, including notifying you of job opportunities that may be of

interest and sharing with our affiliates. We limit the personal data we collect

to that which we believe is appropriate and necessary to manage applicants’

needs, provide our services, and comply with applicable laws. Any information we

collect in connection with your application will be treated in accordance with

our internal policies and programs designed to protect personal data. Please see

our privacy policy [https://scale.com/legal/privacy] for additional information.