Senior Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

We are hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer for Databricks' Engineering team reporting to an Engineering Leader. You will be part of the Databricks engineering organization, working with teams that develop Databricks products and features for thousands of enterprises worldwide.

Key Characteristics

As an executive engineering individual contributor at Databricks, you will have full ownership of the product or infrastructure direction in a major area, driving it from initial development to scalable solutions with clear business impact. You will serve as a force multiplier by elevating stability, reliability, and organizational processes, while bringing deep expertise in large-scale distributed systems. You will mentor senior engineers, contribute to recruiting, and lead high-impact company projects, often tackling complex problems beyond their comfort zone. 

Job Description

At Databricks, we are obsessed with enabling data teams to solve the world's toughest problems, from security threat detection to cancer drug development. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform, so our customers can focus on the high value challenges that are central to their own missions.

Our engineering teams build highly technical products that fulfill real, important needs in the world. We develop and operate one of the largest scale software platforms. The fleet consists of millions of virtual machines, generating terabytes of logs and processing exabytes of data per day. At our scale, we regularly observe cloud hardware, network, and operating system faults, and our software must gracefully shield our customers from any of the above.

The Impact you will have:

• Solve real business needs at large scale by applying your software engineering.
• Deliver a highly scalable, available, and fault-tolerant engine processing hundreds of TB of data daily across thousands of customers
• Low level systems debugging, performance measurement & optimization on large production clusters.
• Build architecture design, influence product roadmap, and take ownership and responsibility over new projects
• Use your deep experience to help prevent and investigate production issues.
• Plan and lead complicated technical projects that work with several teams within the company.
• A strong influencer or driver in the organization’s roadmap and direction.
• Lead a TLG or similar review committee, or initiate and sustain an org/eng-wide initiative driven by engineering needs.
• Break down complex problems quickly into potential solutions, knowns, and unknowns, and de-risk (through prototyping/validation).
• Contribute as a Technical Team Lead by mentoring others, lead sprint planning, delegating work and assignments to team members and participate in project planning.

What we look for:

• 15+ years industry experience building and supporting large-scale distributed systems.
• Comfortable working towards a multi-year vision with incremental deliverables.
• Motivated by delivering customer value and impact.
• Strong foundation in algorithms and data structures and their real-world use cases.
• Experience driving company initiatives towards customer satisfaction.