Sr. Staff Software Engineer — Observability, Insights & Governance

Databricks • San Francisco, CA

5d

About The Position

At Databricks, observability and governance are what turn a massive, multi-tenant data and AI platform into one customers can trust at scale. We are looking for a senior technical leader to drive strategy and execution across three closely related teams at the heart of that mission: Query Observability, SQL Warehouse Management, and Account-Level Observability and Governance. Query Observability builds the performance and observability tooling, ingesting very large volumes of query telemetry and turning it into history views, execution plans, performance insights, and recommendations that help customers run workloads reliably at scale. Beyond query observability, you will be responsible for building observability and actionable insights at compute level, workspace level, and account level so that admins can confidently manage large accounts. This is a new technical leadership role responsible for setting the durable architecture across all these surfaces, raising the engineering bar of the combined team, and shaping the next generation of agentic experiences that let users — and the systems they run on — investigate, diagnose, and act on insights across query, warehouse, workspace, and account levels.

Requirements

• 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).

Nice To Haves

• experience building agentic experiences using LLMs

Responsibilities

• 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 This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior