Sr. Staff Software Engineer - Observability, Insights & Governance

The Impact You Will Have

• Establish the long-term technical direction across query observability, warehouse management, and account-level governance, and own the multi-year architecture all three surfaces are built on.
• Design and lead high-impact projects that move the needle on performance, reliability, and cost transparency for customers.
• Build the next generation of agentic observability and governance — extensible experiences that let users and automated agents investigate, diagnose, and act on telemetry across query, warehouse, and account.
• Partner deeply with Databricks SQL, Unity Catalog, AI, security, and platform teams to integrate end-to-end visibility and governance across the data plane and control plane.
• Mentor senior engineers, set the technical standards across the group, and recruit top talent into observability, insights, and governance.
• Champion reliable, high-quality software and the operational practices that let a focused team confidently support product surfaces used by tens of thousands of customers.

What We Look For

• 12+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems, observability or governance platforms, databases, or backend infrastructure.
• A proven track record as a technical leader on teams operating in complex, multi-stakeholder environments — driving long-term architecture while still delivering incremental customer impact.
• Deep computer science fundamentals (algorithms, data structures, systems design) applied to real-world, high-throughput problems.
• Experience with one or more of: observability and telemetry pipelines, query engines and query analytics, distributed tracing and metrics, time-series storage, data governance, or large-scale logging systems.
• Strong cross-functional communication skills — able to align engineering, product, and infrastructure partners across multiple teams on technical strategy and trade-offs.
• BS in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience (MS/PhD a plus).
• Bonus: experience building agentic experiences using LLMs.

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.

Zone 2 Pay Range $217,100—$298,550 USD