Senior Software Engineer, Orchestration Platform
About this role
Scale AI builds reliable artificial intelligence systems that help leading enterprises, governments, and frontier labs develop, deploy, and evaluate AI models at scale. The company maintains an orchestration platform that powers core company workflows, ranging from data and model-evaluation pipelines to operational systems and customer-facing applications.
Engineers joining the orchestration team design foundational primitives, services, and developer tooling that enable internal teams to author, operate, observe, and scale distributed workflows securely. The group exists to provide durable infrastructure for critical company processes using technologies like Temporal, Cadence, and Kubernetes. Software professionals who enjoy building backend infrastructure, managing complex distributed systems, and collaborating closely with internal platform consumers find a natural home here.
What you will do
- Lead the architecture, design, implementation, and operation of Scale’s core orchestration platform.
- Build durable workflow infrastructure using technologies such as Temporal, Cadence, Kubernetes, and cloud-native systems.
- Define platform primitives and APIs for scheduling, retries, state management, task execution, observability, and workflow lifecycle management.
- Partner with product, infrastructure, data, and application teams to understand workflow needs and turn them into reusable platform capabilities.
- Improve the reliability, scalability, security, and developer experience of services that run critical company workflows.
- Establish technical standards and best practices for distributed workflow development, deployment, testing, and incident response.
- Drive cross-functional technical decisions and communicate platform direction clearly to engineers and stakeholders.
What you need
- Bring five or more years of full-time software engineering experience with a primary focus on backend, infrastructure, and distributed systems.
- Demonstrate a history of building and operating production systems that require high reliability, availability, and scale.
- Possess deep familiarity with workflow orchestration platforms such as Temporal, Cadence, AWS Step Functions, or Kubernetes.
- Show deep familiarity with Kubernetes and containerized production environments, alongside working knowledge of Terraform and Docker.
- Apply strong knowledge of distributed-systems concepts including asynchronous execution, retries, idempotency, fault tolerance, state management, and observability.
- Maintain a track record of leading technically complex projects from initial design through rollout and ongoing operation.
- Communicate effectively to collaborate with platform consumers and non-technical stakeholders.
Nice to have
- Experience with data warehouses (Snowflake, Firebolt) and data pipeline/ETL tools (Dagster, dbt)
- Experience with authentication/authorization systems (Zanzibar, Authz, etc.)
- Experience scaling products at hyper-growth startups
- Excitement to work with AI technologies
Benefits
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
- Retirement benefits
- Learning and development stipend
- Generous PTO
- Commuter stipend
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the salary range for this role?
The base salary range for this full-time position in San Francisco and New York is $216,000 to $270,000 USD. The exact range is determined during the interview process based on work location, skills, experience, and qualifications.
What technologies does the orchestration platform use?
The team builds durable workflow infrastructure using technologies such as Temporal, Cadence, Kubernetes, and cloud-native systems. Engineers also utilize tools like Terraform and Docker in containerized production environments.
What benefits are included with the position?
Eligible employees receive comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage, retirement benefits, a learning and development stipend, and generous PTO. Additionally, the role may qualify for a commuter stipend and equity-based compensation.
How does the waiting period policy work?
The company policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. This allows for a fair and thorough evaluation of all applicants.