Sr. Software Engineer - Ingestion Core team

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

Job summary

Databricks is seeking an experienced engineer for the Ingestion Core Team in San Francisco to help build distributed platform systems that ingest petabyte-scale data from diverse sources into Delta Lake with CDC and schema evolution.

You will reduce latency, increase throughput, and cut costs while designing streaming and batch ingestion workflows, monitoring, and observability. Collaboration with AI/Agent teams and SDKs will be part of the role.

Qualifications

• Production code experience in one of Java, Scala, Go, C++, or Python.
• Experience architecting large-scale distributed and asynchronous systems.
• Experience with distributed systems, streaming, Spark, databases, data processing, or CDC.
• Experience building or operating systems where scale, throughput, latency, reliability, and cost are important considerations.
• Comfortable using AI tools and defining effective evals to shorten the development loop.

Responsibilities

• Build distributed infrastructure to ingest data from diverse sources and support streaming ingestion, incremental processing, and replication.
• Reduce end-to-end latency, increase throughput, and reduce costs from the time data appears in source systems to when it is available in Delta Lake.
• Design and optimize streaming and distributed workloads for throughput, cost, latency, reliability, and scale.
• Optimize streaming workloads by exploring and applying ML techniques.
• Build monitoring and observability capabilities (customer-facing and internal) that provide visibility into ingestion workflows and the systems running them.
• Collaborate with partner teams to enable use cases like RAG and AI agents.
• Build Agentic SDKs with strong evaluations.

Skills

5+ years coding (Java/Scala/Go/C++/Py)

Distributed systems

Streaming / Spark

High throughput / low latency

AI evals

Tools

Spark

Job description

Deeply understanding what’s in the enterprise data has been a challenge that Databricks has been addressing by providing analytics and machine learning tools. From data warehousing with Databricks SQL to large-scale distributed processing with Spark and advanced ML tools for experimentation and model serving, we empower our customers to gain insights and drive innovation.

To enable all of this on Databricks, making data ingestion seamless is crucial. That’s the mission of the Ingestion Core Team: to make the ingestion of all data—structured and unstructured—simple, reliable, and efficient. Simplifying the complex is hard, and that’s where you come in. This role requires building distributed platform systems to incrementally ingest high-volume, petabyte-scale data from diverse sources—including cloud storage (SQS, ADLS, GCS), databases (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres), and file sources (Google Drive, SharePoint)—at high throughput and low cost. The data includes structured formats (JSON, Parquet, CSV) as well as unstructured data (text, images, docs, PPTs, and blobs), all of which land in Delta Lake with schema evolution and change data capture (CDC) capabilities.

Join us in making data ingestion effortless and be part of the team that powers the future of AI + data at Databricks!

As an engineer on the team, you will work on projects that:

• Build distributed infrastructure to ingest data from diverse sources and support streaming ingestion, incremental processing, and replication. This isn’t just about building plugin connectors.
• Reduce end-to-end latency, increase throughput, and reduce costs from the time data appears in source systems to when it is available in Delta Lake.
• Design and optimize streaming and distributed workloads for throughput, cost, latency, reliability, and scale.
• Optimize streaming workloads by exploring and applying ML techniques.
• Build monitoring and observability capabilities (customer-facing and internal) that provide visibility into ingestion workflows and the systems running them.
• Collaborate with partner teams to enable use cases like RAG and AI agents.
• Build Agentic SDKs with strong evaluations.

Ideal Engineer should have:

• 5+ years of experience writing production code in one of: Java, Scala, Go, C++, or Python.
• Experience architecting, developing, and deploying large-scale distributed and asynchronous systems.
• Experience with distributed systems, streaming, Spark, databases, data processing, or CDC.
• Experience building or operating systems where scale, throughput, latency, reliability, and cost are important considerations.
• Comfortable using AI tools and defining effective evals to shorten the development loop.

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 here.

Local Pay Range

$166,000 — $225,000 USD

About Databricks

Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 20,000 organizations worldwide — including adidas, AT&T, Bayer, Block, Mastercard, Rivian, Unilever, and 70% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data + AI Platform to build and scale data and AI apps, analytics and agents. Headquartered in San Francisco with 30+ offices around the globe, Databricks offers a unified platform that includes Genie, Lakebase, Agent Bricks, Lakeflow, Lakehouse, and Unity Catalog. To learn more, follow Databricks on LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and Instagram.

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 click here.

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.