Sr. Staff Technical Program Manager - Reliability

Databricks • San Francisco, WA

5d

About The Position

At Databricks, we are passionate about empowering data teams to tackle the world's most complex challenges — from bringing the next mode of transportation to reality to accelerating the development of medical breakthroughs. We achieve this by building and operating the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform, enabling our customers to leverage deep data insights and enhance their business. We are seeking an exceptional Senior Staff Technical Program Manager (TPM) for Reliability to lead the strategy, execution, and continuous improvement of our most critical Reliability initiatives across infrastructure and product engineering teams at Databricks. As Databricks scales to support thousands of customers and the world’s most data-intensive workloads, Reliability is foundational to our mission. In this role, you will lead cross-company programs that significantly enhance the reliability, performance, and operational excellence of our multi-cloud infrastructure. This is a high-visibility, high-impact leadership role partnering closely with our most senior engineering leaders, including Reliability Program executive sponsors, senior TLs, and Engineering Managers to define Reliability strategy, set long-term goals, and execute multi-quarter programs to build the most reliable cloud platform on the planet to help our customers run their mission-critical workloads on. To be successful, you must possess a deep understanding of large-scale distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and engineering principles that drive operational excellence. You will leverage your background to anticipate risks, shape technical direction, and deliver complex programs across product, engineering, SRE, and cloud partner teams.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience managing and delivering large-scale technical programs in cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, SRE, or platform engineering environments.
• Experience developing infrastructure at two or more hyperscale cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP), with knowledge of cloud primitives, multi-AZ/region architecture, and control plane/data plane patterns.
• Demonstrated success leading Reliability Programs at scale - including availability, failover, operational excellence, incident reduction, or dependency hardening.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure, distributed systems, or SRE practices; previous engineering or SRE experience is highly preferred.
• Experience partnering directly with senior engineering leadership to define strategy and drive large, multi-team initiatives.
• Ability to translate ambiguous goals into actionable program plans with clear milestones, KPIs, and success metrics.
• Demonstrated ability to manage complex cross-organizational dependencies, technical risks, and multi-quarter timelines.
• Experience delivering programs across multiple clouds and/or large-scale cloud-native services.
• Experience building and scaling engineering processes, operational frameworks, and stakeholder alignment mechanisms.

Nice To Haves

• Background in distributed systems engineering, SRE, platform infrastructure, or cloud services.
• Experience with large-scale compute fleets, container orchestration, autoscaling, or control-plane architecture.
• Familiarity with reliability methodologies such as SLOs, error budgets, chaos engineering, failure mode analysis, and incident management frameworks.
• Expertise using Jira or equivalent tools for program tracking and execution.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field; advanced degree preferred.

Responsibilities

• Lead Reliability Strategy + Multi-Quarter Roadmaps Partner with senior engineering leadership to define the long-term Reliability roadmap, influence technical direction, and ensure alignment across teams. Ensure clarity and alignment on priorities across engineering teams, including Platform Engineering, Compute Fleet Management, SRE, Security, and Cloud Partnerships.
• Drive Execution of Critical Reliability Programs Own program execution end-to-end: planning, risk management, dependency mapping, trade-off decisions, status reporting, and delivery. Identify gaps in process or architecture and work with TLs to proactively drive organizational or technical improvements.
• Partner Deeply with Engineering & Influence Technical Direction Using your background in infrastructure, distributed systems, or SRE to help teams make sound design and prioritization decisions. Facilitate alignment between cross-functional teams to ensure programs are technically grounded and execution-ready. Bring systems thinking to diagnose reliability bottlenecks and drive improvements to scalability, fault tolerance, automation, and operational tooling.
• Elevate Reliability Culture Across the Organization Drive adoption of reliability best practices across engineering teams - including error budgets, incident reviews, design-for-resilience patterns, and operational readiness. Define and implement program governance, repeatable processes, metrics, and documentation to scale reliability efforts across teams. Evangelize reliability expectations and engineer-empowering processes that reduce operational load and improve incident preparedness.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees