Senior Software Engineer, Machine Learning Infrastructure - Generative AI

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