Senior Backend Engineer - Filesystem & Distributed Systems

Xapply; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 166,000 - 225,000; Full time

Job summary

Databricks is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Files team to innovate at the intersection of storage, performance, and distributed systems. You will shape our filesystem strategy to support next-generation agentic workloads across thousands of data, AI, and agentic tasks.

You will design, build, and operate scalable filesystem platforms, optimize performance from API to kernel, and collaborate with platform teams to define future compute/storage architectures.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree (or higher) in Computer Science or a related field.
• 5+ years of production-level experience in Java, Scala, C++, Go, Rust, or a similar language.
• 3+ years of experience developing large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, or MicroVM technologies and cloud provider internals (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Experience with filesystems and FUSE.
• Experience building object/blob storage (S3, Azure Blob Storage, GCS).
• Systems performance engineering across microservices, down to the Linux level.
• Background in high-scale content, storage, or file-sync products.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the filesystem platform powering tens of thousands of data, AI and agentic workloads daily.
• Push filesystem performance for the most demanding workloads — profiling and optimizing across the stack, from the API layer down to the Linux kernel.
• Partner with teams across the platform to design and evolve next-generation compute and storage architectures.
• Set the technical direction for how content is organized across Databricks, standardizing around filesystem primitives that apply to every product surface.

Skills

Java

Scala

C++

Go

Rust

Distributed systems

Filesystems

Performance engineering

Storage

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Firecracker

Job description

Databricks is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Files team to innovate at the intersection of storage, performance, and distributed systems. You will shape our filesystem strategy to support next-generation agentic workloads across thousands of data, AI, and agentic tasks.

You will design, build, and operate scalable filesystem platforms, optimize performance from API to kernel, and collaborate with platform teams to define future compute/storage architectures.