Senior Staff Data Platform Architect

Databricks Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 229,000 - 314,000; Full time

Job summary

Databricks is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to serve as a technical architect and engineering leader for the Lakeflow platform. You will own the long-term technical direction for pipelines, declarative dataflow, materialized views, and related systems used by thousands of production customers.

This role requires deep distributed-systems expertise, cross-team collaboration, and the ability to drive scalable, incremental solutions that bridge research and production at exabyte scale.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience building, operating, and evolving large-scale distributed systems in production.
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Responsibilities

• Architect and deliver a highly scalable, fault-tolerant platform for declarative pipelines and materialized views serving thousands of production customers.
• Turn ambiguous, large-scale technical challenges into clear execution plans that ship incrementally and hold up at exabyte scale.
• Bridge the gap between research and production by bringing ideas from the academic literature or internal R&D into systems that solve real customer problems.
• Lead deep systems work: performance diagnosis on large production clusters, low-level debugging, and optimization that moves the needle on cost and latency.
• Shape product direction alongside engineering and product leadership, owning technical strategy from design through delivery.
• Drive complex, multi-team technical initiatives that require sustained coordination and clear technical judgment.

Skills

Distributed systems

Database internals

Storage systems

Distributed computing

Streaming systems

Language/API design

Performance engineering

Technical leadership

Algorithms

Customer focus

Cross-team collaboration

Academic-to-production translation

Education

BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Databricks platform familiarity (Genie, Lakebase, Agent Bricks, Lakeflow, Lakehouse, Unity Catalog)

Job description

Databricks is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to serve as a technical architect and engineering leader for the Lakeflow platform. You will own the long-term technical direction for pipelines, declarative dataflow, materialized views, and related systems used by thousands of production customers.

This role requires deep distributed-systems expertise, cross-team collaboration, and the ability to drive scalable, incremental solutions that bridge research and production at exabyte scale.