Senior Software Engineer, Machine Learning Infrastructure - Generative AI

Doordashusa
San Francisco; Sunnyvale; Seattle, US
On-site

Who this role is best for

Aimed at senior engineers with deep backend and ML infrastructure experience who thrive in ambiguous, high-impact systems.

Best fit for

  • Senior engineers who own production services at scale and push GPU cost/performance frontiers.
    — “owning ambiguous, high-impact systems and pushing the cost/performance frontier of GPU inference
  • Technical leaders who mentor engineers and turn customer needs into platform capabilities.
    — “mentor engineers as you go and turning customer use cases into reusable platform capabilities
  • Backend experts with hands-on LLM inference or fine-tuning experience in production.
    — “Deep hands-on experience with LLM inference and/or fine-tuning of open-weight models in production

Things to consider

  • Role requires operating in fast-moving technical areas with evolving tradeoffs.
    — “fast-moving technical area where product needs, model capabilities, vendor ecosystems, and cost/performance tradeoffs are evolving quickly
  • Must partner with cross-functional teams across multiple companies.
    — “Partner closely with — and raise the technical bar for — ML engineers, product engineers, data scientists, and platform teams across DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo

How to stand out

  • Highlight specific production wins with open-weight models and cost/latency optimizations.
    — “delivering large cost and latency wins (for example, a billion embeddings produced roughly 20× cheaper
  • Showcase experience with LLM inference engines and serving frameworks.
    — “Experience with LLM inference engines and serving frameworks (e.g., vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM) in production
  • Demonstrate technical leadership in ambiguous, fast-moving areas.
    — “leading design across ambiguous, fast-moving technical areas
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · HighDecision Impact · CompanyLevel · Senior

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • design and architecture of open-weights model platform
  • set technical direction for GenAI platform
Typical background
6+ years of industry experience in software engineeringdeep backend experience

Skills & requirements

Required

LLM And VLM ServingGPU AutoscalingBatch InferenceModel Fine-tuning

Preferred

Reinforcement LearningAgent OptimizationPost-training Techniques

Stack & domain

LLMVlmGlmQwenKimiDeepseekGpuBatch InferenceFine-tuningObservabilitySlosPlaybooksOperational ExcellenceLeadershipCommunicationMachine LearningAISoftware Engineering

About the role

Original posting from Doordashusa via Greenhouse

About the Team

DoorDash’s GenAI Platform team sits within Machine Learning Platform and builds the shared infrastructure that helps DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo teams safely bring GenAI-powered products, agents, automation, and personalization to production. Our mission is to increase the velocity of business impact from GenAI. A central pillar of that work is running frontier open-weight LLMs and VLMs (such as GLM, Qwen, Kimi, and DeepSeek) ourselves — real-time GPU serving, high-throughput batch inference, and fine-tuning on autoscaling GPUs — delivering large cost and latency wins (for example, a billion embeddings produced roughly 20× cheaper and visual models served roughly 72% cheaper). We also own core platform surfaces including the LLM Gateway, Agent Gateway, evals infrastructure, guardrails, and cost attribution.

About the Role

You will join a small, high-leverage team building production infrastructure for Generative AI at DoorDash, leading the design and architecture of our open-weights model platform spanning inference and fine-tuning: real-time GPU serving, high-throughput batch inference, and model fine-tuning. You’ll set technical direction across model serving and inference engines, fine-tuning and training pipelines, GPU autoscaling and utilization, batch pipelines, backend services, and observability, and mentor engineers as you go. This role is ideal for a senior engineer who enjoys owning ambiguous, high-impact systems and pushing the cost/performance frontier of GPU inference and fine-tuning in a fast-moving technical area where product needs, model capabilities, vendor ecosystems, and cost/performance tradeoffs are evolving quickly.

You’re excited about this opportunity because you will…

Lead the design of infrastructure that helps DoorDash teams move GenAI ideas from prototype to production, increasing the velocity of business impact from AI across the company.

Own and evolve our open-weights serving stack — real-time GPU endpoints, high-throughput batch inference, and fine-tuning (SFT/DPO/LoRA) — alongside the LLM Gateway, Agent Gateway, evals infrastructure, guardrails, and cost attribution.

Architect scalable, high-performance systems for model serving, batch inference, GPU autoscaling, and fine-tuning that power real customer and internal automation use cases

Push the cost and latency frontier of GPU inference — turning batch jobs that took days into hours and cutting inference cost by multiples — while giving product teams a clean choice across open-weight and closed-source models with reliability, fallback, observability, and cost controls built in.

Build platforms that support rapid experimentation while meeting production standards for latency, scale, monitoring, SLOs, playbooks, and operational excellence.

Partner closely with — and raise the technical bar for — ML engineers, product engineers, data scientists, and platform teams across DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo to turn emerging GenAI capabilities into durable platform primitives.

Set technical direction for the future of DoorDash’s centralized GenAI platform — including emerging directions such as reinforcement learning (RLHF/RLVR), agent optimization, and other post-training and agentic techniques — enabling the next generation of AI-powered products, agents, automation, and personalization.

We’re excited about you because…

B.S., M.S., or PhD. in Computer Science or equivalent

6+ years of industry experience in software engineering

Deep backend engineering fundamentals, especially in Python and distributed systems.

Track record of designing and owning production services, APIs, data pipelines, or ML infrastructure at scale.

Experience operating systems in production, including observability, debugging, reliability, incident response, and performance/cost optimization.

Deep hands-on experience with LLM inference and/or fine-tuning of open-weight models in production — serving (latency, throughput, batching, autoscaling, GPU utilization) and/or fine-tuning (SFT/DPO/LoRA).

Demonstrated technical leadership: leading design across ambiguous, fast-moving technical areas, mentoring engineers, and turning customer use cases into reusable platform capabilities

Proficiency in using AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) in the full software development lifecycle, including designing, generating code, testing, monitoring and releasing software

Nice To Haves

Experience with LLM inference engines and serving frameworks (e.g., vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM) in production

Experience with distributed/multi-node fine-tuning and training pipelines (SFT, DPO/RLHF, LoRA), including data preparation and evaluation

GPU performance work — multi-node/distributed inference, KV-cache/memory optimization, quantization (FP8/INT8/AWQ/GPTQ), or cold-start/throughput tuning

Experience with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), GPUs, serverless/elastic GPU platforms (e.g., Modal), or high-throughput batch systems

Experience with LLM gateways, model routing, vendor abstraction, or cost attribution

Experience building developer platforms, internal platforms, or self-serve infrastructure

Experience building and deploying AI agents or MCP servers in production

Experience with eval systems, LLM observability, tracing, RAG, search, or vector databases

 

Compensation

The successful candidate's starting pay will fall within the pay range listed below and is determined based on job-related factors including, but not limited to, skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions.  Base salary is localized according to an employee’s work location. Ranges are market-dependent and may be modified in the future.

In addition to base salary, the compensation for this role includes opportunities for equity grants. Talk to your recruiter for more information.

DoorDash cares about you and your overall well-being. That’s why we offer a comprehensive benefits package to all regular employees, which includes a 401(k) plan with employer matching, 16 weeks of paid parental leave, wellness benefits, commuter benefits match, paid time off and paid sick leave in compliance with applicable laws (e.g. Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act). DoorDash also offers medical, dental, and vision benefits, 11 paid holidays, disability and basic life insurance, family-forming assistance, and a mental health program, among others.

To learn more about our benefits, visit our careers page here.

See below for paid time off details:

For salaried roles: flexible paid time off/vacation, plus 80 hours of paid sick time per year.

For hourly roles: vacation accrued at about 1 hour for every 25.97 hours worked (e.g. about 6.7 hours/month if working 40 hours/week; about 3.4 hours/month if working 20 hours/week), and paid sick time accrued at 1 hour for every 30 hours worked (e.g. about 5.8 hours/month if working 40 hours/week; about 2.9 hours/month if working 20 hours/week).

The national base pay ranges for this position within the United States, including Illinois and Colorado.

I4$137,100—$201,600 USDI5$167,800—$246,800 USDI6$203,500—$299,300 USDAbout DoorDash

At DoorDash, our mission to empower local economies shapes how our team members move quickly, learn, and reiterate in order to make impactful decisions that display empathy for our range of users—from Dashers to merchant partners to consumers. We are a technology and logistics company that started by enabling door-to-door delivery, and we are looking for team members who can help us go from a company that is known as the place you order food to a company that people turn to for any and all goods.

DoorDash is growing rapidly and changing constantly, which gives our team members the opportunity to share their unique perspectives, solve new challenges, and own their careers. We're committed to supporting employees’ happiness, healthiness, and overall well-being by providing comprehensive benefits

Source: Doordashusa careers (Greenhouse)

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