Sr. Manager, Engineering Configuration Platform Team

Databricks; Bellevue (WA); On-site; USD 222,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Databricks is hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Configuration Platform team in Bellevue, Washington. In this hands-on leadership role, you will drive critical stability and efficiency across features and deployments while improving the overall safety of changes made by thousands of engineers.

The ideal candidate will have strong expertise in distributed systems, experience managing backend teams, and the ability to create a frictionless user experience for engineers.

Qualifications

• 5+ years managing infrastructure or platform teams of 7 to 15 engineers.
• Strong understanding of configuration systems and release safety.
• Proven track record in managing high performing teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team shaping how Databricks engineers ship changes.
• Reduce the rate of customer-impacting incidents with stronger guardrails.
• Drive improvements in health-mediated releases and auto-rollback.

Skills

Managing backend teams

Strong distributed systems background

Operational experience with high-availability platforms

Partnering on design reviews

Education

BS in Computer Science (Masters preferred)

Tools

Java

Scala

Kubernetes

Job description

Overview

RDQ427R368

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're only getting started.

The Configuration Platform team owns the systems that move configuration and feature flags across every Databricks service. The platform decouples code deployment from feature enablement for thousands of internal engineers, transports configuration across AWS, Azure, and GCP to every Databricks compute surface, and serves 25,000+ active flags and over 300 million evaluations per second at ~10μs p95 latency. It is the primary lever Databricks uses to safely roll out changes, run experiments, and mitigate incidents in minutes instead of hours.

We\'re looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team within the Configuration Platform organization. This is a hands-on leadership role that combines deep distributed systems judgment with strong people leadership, driving multi-quarter strategy on one of Databricks\' most critical stability primitives while continuing to raise the bar for how engineers across the company ship change safely.

The impact you will have

• You will lead a team that directly shapes how thousands of Databricks engineers ship, ramp, and roll back changes every day
• You will reduce the rate and blast radius of customer-impacting incidents caused by configuration and feature changes, through stronger guardrails, validation, and graduated rollout patterns
• You will close the loop between "bad change" and automated mitigation, driving company-wide MTTR down through investments in health-mediated releases, auto-rollback, and zero-downtime configuration delivery
• You will evolve the Configuration Platform user experience into a frictionless, opinionated set of surfaces (UI, CLI, agentic) where engineers author, review, and roll out changes safely without thinking about the internals
• You will grow the team into a Staff and Principal attracting org whose technical decisions shape how the company balances speed and reliability

What we look for

• 5+ years managing backend, infrastructure, or platform teams of roughly 7 to 15 engineers, ideally in service frameworks, feature flags, configuration systems, release safety, production reliability, or other internal platforms
• Strong distributed systems and infrastructure background: Java/Scala services, RPC and routing layers, configuration systems, Kubernetes-based microservices, and multi-cloud or multi-region deployments
• Hands-on EM disposition: stays close to the code, leads design reviews, and contributes technically alongside the team. Comfortable leveraging AI-assisted coding tools to amplify their own and the team\'s output
• Demonstrated track record managing, growing, and retaining high performing teams
• Comfortable partnering with senior+ engineers on design reviews, roadmap, and cross-team execution while letting strong ICs own technical details
• Operational experience owning a high-availability platform with on-call, incident response, and measurable reliability improvements
• Demonstrated product thinking for developers: shaping opinionated UX, rollout policies, and developer workflows that make the safe path the easy path, with strong taste on the safety versus velocity tradeoff
• BS in Computer Science (Masters or higher level of education preferred)

COVID-19 Vaccination Requirement

As a federal government contractor, Databricks requires new U.S. employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Proof of vaccination will be required as a condition of employment. Databricks will make reasonable accommodations based on medical conditions or religious grounds for qualified candidates in accordance with applicable law.

Pay Range Transparency

Databricks is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range(s) for this role is listed below and represents the expected salary range for non-commissionable roles or on-target earnings for commissionable roles. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to job-related skills, depth of experience, relevant certifications and training, and specific work location. Based on the factors above, Databricks anticipates utilizing the full width of the range. The total compensation package for this position may also include eligibility for annual performance bonus, equity, and the benefits listed above. For more information regarding which range your location is in visit our page.

Local Pay Range $222,000—$300,000 USD