Software Engineer, Platform

Description

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 eval 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 SGP Platform Engineering team. In this role, you will support the design and development of shared platforms used across Scale. This includes designing our foundational data platforms and lifecycle, architecting Scale’s core cloud infrastructure and orchestration stack, and redefining how engineers develop, build, test, and deploy software at Scale. 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.

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 accommodations@scale.com. Please see the United States Department of Labor's Know Your Rights poster for additional information.

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

PLEASE NOTE: We collect, retain and use personal data for our professional 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 for additional information.

Responsibilities

• Drive the design and implementation of our foundational platforms and systems that will become the baseline for Scale’s capabilities.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define and understand requirements, design, and deliver new features within a highly iterative and innovative software development lifecycle.
• Work within the team to lead the market in your team’s AI domain through experimentation with the latest techniques and technologies in this area.
• Proactively identify opportunities for and drive improvements to current programming practices, including process enhancements and tool upgrades.
• Present technical information to teams and stakeholders, providing guidance and insights on development processes and technologies.
• Ideally you’d have:
• 5+ years of full-time engineering experience, post-graduation, with specialties in back-end systems.
• Excitement to work with AI technologies and build agentic experiences.
• Extensive experience in software development and a deep understanding of highly scalable and reliable distributed systems hosted on public cloud platforms.
• Experience building document retrieval and understanding systems, such as RAG, to accurately ingest large-scale client knowledge into client agents and applications.
• A strong track record of independently owning and delivering successful engineering projects, including the ability to collaborate with and inspire others to engage with the problem space.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, and the ability to translate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience working fluently with standard containerization and deployment technologies like Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, etc.
• Experience with long-running agent/code orchestration platforms, such as Temporal.
• Mastery of storing state with structured databases, including Postgres.
• Strong knowledge of software engineering best practices and CI/CD tooling (CircleCI, GHA).
• Nice to haves:
• Experience across multiple cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure, Oracle, on-premise).
• Experience with multiple ways to persist contextual data, e.g., knowledge graphs and hierarchical indexes.
• Experience with other types of large data solutions, e.g., Databricks and Snowflake.
• Experience with authentication/authorization systems (Zanzibar, Authz, etc.).
• Experience scaling technical products at hyper-growth startups.
• 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.