Sr. Manager – Data & AI Support Engineering

Job title: Sr. Manager – Data & AI Support Engineering

About the Role Lead and scale a world-class AI-first Data & AI Support Engineering organization that combines deep technical expertise with operational excellence to accelerate issue resolution and improve platform reliability. Drive AI-enabled support workflows, runbooks, and governance to deliver exceptional customer outcomes across enterprise-scale Data & AI workloads. Partner with Engineering and Product teams to innovate and operationalize AI-assisted diagnostics and intelligent escalation management.

What You'll Do

• Lead and manage Technical Solutions Engineers, Team Leads, and support operations personnel across AMER support functions based out of the Dallas location.
• Own and improve operational KPIs including customer satisfaction, escalation management, backlog health, resolution efficiency, and support quality.
• Act as a senior escalation point for customers and internal teams while driving operational excellence and process optimization.
• Lead hiring, onboarding, mentoring, technical assessments, training, and career development for support engineers and technical leads. Conduct regular one-on-ones, annual review, and career development discussions with direct reports.
• Be a hands-on technical leader supporting complex issues related to Spark Core, Spark SQL, Structured Streaming, Delta Lake, Lakehouse architecture, and Databricks Runtime technologies. Guide customers on Spark runtime optimization, distributed systems performance, and best practices for scalable Data & AI workloads.
• Own Engineering JIRA escalations and proactively drive faster resolutions for customer-reported product issues.
• Maintain internal operational documentation, runbooks, and customer-facing knowledge base assets.
• Coordinate closely with Engineering and Backline Support engineering, customer experience intelligence teams to identify, reproduce, and report product defects effectively.
• Act as a strong customer advocate and collaborate with cloud partners to support mutual customer success.
• Participate in major incident management, escalation handling, on-call rotations, and critical production support activities.

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, troubleshooting, and supporting large-scale Data & AI applications using Python, Java, Scala, Spark, or related distributed technologies.
• Strong work experience of AI-enabled support workflows, agentic AI systems, Claude Skills workflows, RAG architectures, vector databases and any other operational automation frameworks.
• Proven development/delivery experience at a production scale in Databricks tech stacks like Model serving, Lakehouse, Delta, DLT, Lakeflow, Lakebase platforms is a strong plus.
• Experience using AI tools for troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, observability analysis, and support workflow acceleration.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Apache Spark, Spark SQL, Structured Streaming, Delta Lake, and distributed data processing systems.
• Experience leading production-scale workloads across Big Data, Hadoop, AI/ML, Kafka, Streaming, Data Science, or Analytics platforms.
• Strong troubleshooting and performance tuning experience for Spark and JVM-based distributed systems, including memory management, garbage collection, heap analysis, and thread dump analysis.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP cloud platforms.
• Proven experience managing globally distributed technical teams and handling high-severity customer escalations.
• Strong analytical, debugging, problem-solving, and distributed systems troubleshooting skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with strong customer-facing leadership abilities.
• Strong organizational, multitasking, stakeholder management, and operational leadership capabilities.

Nice to Have

• Proven development/delivery experience at production scale in Databricks tech stacks like Model serving, Lakehouse, Delta, DLT, Lakeflow, Lakebase – strong plus.

Compensation & Benefits

• Benefits: At Databricks, we strive to provide comprehensive benefits and perks that meet the needs of all of our employees. For specific details on the benefits offered in your region click here.