Senior Staff Software Engineer - Unity Catalog Runtime Enforcement

Databricks Inc.; Greater London; On-site; GBP 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading data and AI company in London is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the Unity Catalog Runtime Enforcement team. This role involves growing an engineering team, establishing operational models, and driving complex technical projects across the organization. The ideal candidate should have over 15 years of experience in building distributed systems, a security-first mindset, and a strong commitment to customer satisfaction. The position offers an opportunity to influence company initiatives while ensuring robust data governance in a collaborative environment.

Qualifications

• 15+ years industry experience building and supporting large-scale distributed systems.
• Extensive experience building and maintaining distributed systems.
• Motivated by delivering customer value and impact.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow an engineering team delivering runtime enforcement outcomes.
• Establish single-source-of-truth scope and operating model.
• Plan and lead complicated technical projects working with multiple teams.

Skills

Large-scale distributed systems

Security mindset

Cross-organizational leadership

Customer satisfaction focus

Education

BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or related majors

Job description

Senior Staff Software Engineer - Unity Catalog Runtime Enforcement

London, United Kingdom

RDQ127R176

At Databricks, we are passionate about enabling data teams to solve the world's toughest problems — from making the next mode of transportation a reality to accelerating the development of medical breakthroughs. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform so our customers can use deep data insights to improve their business. Founded by engineers — and customer obsessed — we leap at every opportunity to tackle technical challenges, from designing next‑gen UI/UX for interfacing with data to scaling our services and infrastructure across millions of virtual machines. And we are only getting started.

Our engineering teams build highly technical products that fulfil 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.

Unity Catalog is our platform native unified and open governance for data and AI. It eliminates silos, simplifies governance and accelerates insights at scale. We are looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead Unity Catalog Runtime Enforcement. We build and harden the runtime enforcement layer for Unity Catalog, ensuring secure, consistent authorization and data access across Databricks compute, engines, and clouds. This reduces incidents and simplifies customer choices by unifying enforcement semantics.

The impact you will have

• Lead and grow an engineering team delivering runtime enforcement outcomes in a high‑severity, cross‑org domain; establish scope, SLAs, and phased roadmaps
• Establish single‑source‑of‑truth scope, operating model, and durable mechanisms for enforcement
• Lead multi‑year, multi‑team initiatives that shape how Databricks enforces Unity Catalog at runtime across compute types and engines
• Introduce tools to allow greater automation and operability of services
• 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
• 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
• Extensive experience building and maintaining distributed systems
• Security first mindset
• Cross‑org leadership in ambiguous, incident‑heavy environments; disciplined rollout and ops maturity
• Motivated by delivering customer value and impact
• Experience driving company initiatives towards customer satisfaction
• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or related majors, or equivalent experience

About Databricks

Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 10,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, Grammarly, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify and democratize data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow.

Benefits

At Databricks, we strive to provide comprehensive benefits and perks that meet the needs of all of our employees. For specific details on the benefits offered in your region, please visit https://www.mybenefitsnow.com/databricks.

Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

At Databricks, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can excel. We take great care to ensure that our hiring practices are inclusive and meet equal employment opportunity standards. Individuals looking for employment at Databricks are considered without regard to age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio‑economic status, veteran status, and other protected characteristics.

Compliance

If access to export‑controlled technology or source code is required for performance of job duties, it is within Employer's discretion whether to apply for a U.S. government license for such positions, and Employer may decline to proceed with an applicant on this basis alone.