Data Platform Engineer, Senior Staff

Qualcomm•San Diego, CA

5d•Onsite

About The Position

We are hiring a Data Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate a modern, data platform with Databricks Lakehouse as a core foundation. This role is ideal for a senior engineer who excels in system design, platform innovation, and hands‑on execution. You will help design, implement and improve reliability of the data platform, influence architectural direction, and mentor engineers while working closely with data scientists, analysts, and application teams. This is a hands‑on, high‑impact role with strong ownership across architecture, implementation, reliability, security, and cost optimization. This role requires full-time onsite work (5 days per week) in either San Diego, CA or Boulder, CO.

Requirements

7+ years of IT-related work experience with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems or a related field. OR 9+ years of IT-related work experience without a Bachelor’s degree.
5+ years of work experience with programming (e.g., Java, Python).
3+ years of work experience with SQL or NoSQL Databases.
3+ years of work experience with Data Structures and algorithms.
Proven experience designing complex, distributed data systems end‑to‑end
Strong system design skills across cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, storage, governance, and observability
Ability to evaluate and communicate architectural trade‑offs (scalability, reliability, cost, security, operability)
Demonstrated innovation mindset, such as: Modernizing or simplifying legacy data platforms Introducing new architectural patterns or platform capabilities Improving reliability, performance, or developer experience through design
8+ years building and operating large‑scale cloud platforms
5+ years in Data Platform, DevOps, SRE, or DataOps roles
Expert‑level experience with AWS, including networking, IAM, security, and multi-account environments
Strong hands‑on experience with Databricks Lakehouse Platform, including: Unity Catalog Delta Lake MLflow
Experience owning Databricks workspace architecture and governance
Deep experience with Terraform/Terramate (or similar IaC tools)
Proven experience building CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins)
Advanced Python and Bash scripting skills
Hands‑on experience managing Amazon EKS clusters and Helm deployments
Experience defining and operating SLIs/SLOs for platform reliability and data quality
Strong understanding of cloud security best practices
Experience supporting SOX, GDPR, or regulated environments
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (or equivalent experience)
Ability to work independently and mentor team members
Strong communication skills to explain complex system designs to technical and non‑technical stakeholders

Nice To Haves

Experience with Acceldata, OpenTelemetry, or data observability tools
Experience with Fivetran Hybrid / HVR or enterprise ingestion tools
Experience working with Hashicorp vault or similar secret management tools
Policy‑as‑code experience using OPA
Experience working with static Code analysis tool like Sonar
Experience with data lineage or metadata management tools
Databricks serverless compute optimization and cost management
Experience driving platform strategy across multiple teams distributed globally

Responsibilities

Design and build scalable, distributed data platform systems
Own Databricks workspace architecture, governance, and lifecycle management
Implement infrastructure as code using Terraform/Terramate
Build and support end‑to‑end data pipelines, from ingestion to analytics and ML
Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure, data pipelines, notebooks, SQL, and ML artifacts
Operate and optimize Amazon EKS clusters supporting data workloads
Define and monitor SLIs/SLOs for platform reliability and data quality
Drive innovation and continuous improvement across platform architecture and tooling
Lead incident response, on‑call rotations, and blameless post‑mortems
Implement strong security, compliance, and governance controls
Mentor engineers and influence platform standards and best practices