About this role
Job title: Sr. Manager, Engineering Configuration Platform Team
About the Role Databricks is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team within the Configuration Platform organization. This hands-on leadership role combines deep distributed systems judgment with strong people leadership, guiding multi-quarter strategy to balance speed and reliability for a critical stability primitive used across thousands of Databricks engineers. You will shape how engineers ship, ramp, and roll back changes while driving safer, faster configuration delivery.
What You'll Do
- Lead a team of 7-15 engineers within the Configuration Platform, driving architecture, priorities, and delivery.
- Reduce incidents from configuration and feature changes by strengthening guardrails, validation, and graduated rollout patterns; drive MTTR down via health-mediated releases, auto-rollback, and zero-downtime configuration delivery.
- Close the loop between bad changes and automated mitigation; partner across the company to improve reliability and rollout safety.
- Evolve the Configuration Platform UX (UI, CLI, agentic surfaces) so engineers can author, review, and roll out changes safely without exposing internal complexity.
- Grow the team toward Staff and Principal levels, attracting top engineering talent and shaping technical decisions that balance speed and reliability across the platform.
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years managing backend, infrastructure, or platform teams of roughly 7 to 15 engineers, with experience in service frameworks, feature flags, configuration systems, release safety, production reliability, or internal platforms.
- Strong distributed systems and infrastructure background: Java/Scala services, RPC and routing layers, configuration systems, Kubernetes-based microservices, and multi-cloud or multi-region deployments.
- Hands-on EM disposition: stays close to code, leads design reviews, and contributes technically alongside the team; comfortable leveraging AI-assisted coding tools.
- Demonstrated track record of managing, growing, and retaining high-performing teams.
- Ability to partner with senior+ engineers on design reviews, roadmaps, and cross-team execution while letting strong ICs own technical details.
- Operational experience owning a high-availability platform with on-call, incident response, and measurable reliability improvements.
- Demonstrated product thinking for developers: shaping opinionated UX, rollout policies, and developer workflows that make the safe path the easy path, with a clear safety vs velocity tradeoff.
- BS in Computer Science; Masters or higher preferred.
Nice to Have
- Master's or higher in Computer Science is preferred.
- Experience with AI-assisted coding tools to augment team output.
Compensation & Benefits
- Local pay range: $222,000—$300,000 USD per year.
- The total compensation may include annual performance bonus, equity, and benefits.
- Databricks offers comprehensive benefits; details vary by region.