Sr Engineering Manager - Service Foundations

About The Team

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.

In this role, you will work closely with leaders across the company, within engineering, as well as with product management, field engineering, recruiting, and HR. You will lead critical infrastructure initiatives that build and operate distributed systems, driving company-wide efficiency, reliability, and automation. You’ll shape how the next generation of systems is built—integrating AI-driven tooling directly into the infrastructure itself to make it more adaptive, scalable, and intelligent.

The Impact You Will Have

• Solve real business needs at a large scale by applying your software engineering expertise.
• Ensure consistent delivery against milestones and strong alignment with the field working "two-in-a-box" with product leadership.
• Evolve organizational structure to align with long term initiatives, build strong "5 ingredient" teams with good communications architecture.
• Manage technical debt, including long term technical architecture decisions and balance product roadmap.
• Leading and participating in technical, product, and design discussions.
• Building, managing, and operating highly scalable services in the cloud.
• Growing leaders on the team by providing coaching, mentorship, and growth opportunities.
• Partnering with other engineering and product leaders on planning, prioritization and staffing.
• Creating a culture of excellence on the team while leading with empathy.

What We Look For

• 15+ years of industry experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Proven ability to build, grow, and manage high-performing infrastructure teams, including developing managers and tech leads.
• Deep experience running large-scale cloud infrastructure systems (AWS, Azure, or GCP), ideally across multiple clouds or regions.
• Ability to translate requirements from internal engineering teams into clear priorities and execution plans.
• Fluent across the infrastructure stack — storage, orchestration, observability, and developer platforms — with intuition for how these layers interact.
• Ability to evaluate and evolve abstractions — knows when to unify, when to localize, and how to reduce cognitive load for product teams.

Key skills/competency

• Distributed Systems
• Cloud Infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Technical Leadership
• Team Management
• Scalability
• Observability
• Developer Platforms
• System Architecture
• Product Alignment
• AI-driven Tooling