Staff+ Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Scale AI is building tools and infrastructure to help enterprises leverage artificial intelligence safely and effectively. The Safeguards team focuses on trust and safety mechanisms that protect users and maintain system integrity across Scale's platform.

This Staff+ role sits at the heart of that work. You'll own complex, multi-month infrastructure initiatives from conception through production deployment, building the systems that detect unwanted behaviors, prevent misuse, and enforce policies across Scale's AI operations. You'll design and operate distributed monitoring infrastructure across multiple cloud environments, manage cost and capacity for large-scale workloads, and collaborate with researchers, security teams, and legal to ship detection capabilities quickly on infrastructure everyone trusts.

Your day-to-day will include

• Independently scoping and leading large infrastructure projects through their full lifecycle, starting from ambiguous requirements and delivering production systems
• Building monitoring systems that detect problematic behaviors from API partners, surfacing findings to analysts through internal dashboards with the ability to trigger automated enforcement actions
• Deploying and maintaining monitoring infrastructure across multiple cloud providers, including partner environments with data residency constraints, using shared deployment pipelines and observability tooling
• Designing and hardening the sandboxed runtime where AI agents execute, implementing isolation, network controls, least-privilege access, audit logging, and insider-risk safeguards
• Managing capacity and cost for high-volume, long-running agent workloads while defining and hitting service-level objectives

You have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent professional experience. You're proficient in Python, distributed systems design, and Infrastructure as Code. You've worked across multiple cloud platforms or built provider-agnostic infrastructure. You've built and operated large-scale distributed systems like data platforms, control planes, or job schedulers. You know sandboxing and isolation technologies (containers, microVMs, network policy) or systems languages like Rust. You communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical audiences.

Candidates with 8+ years of software engineering experience, background building systems handling sensitive or regulated data, production LLM agent experience, or expertise in spam, fraud, abuse, or integrity detection are especially strong fits.

What we offer

Annual compensation ranges from $320,000 to $485,000 USD. Scale sponsors visas where possible and will make reasonable efforts to support your immigration needs if hired. You'll work from New York City or San Francisco with an expectation of being in office at least 25% of the time, though some roles require more office presence.