Sr. Staff Software Engineer — Observability, Insights & Governance

Job title: Sr. Staff Software Engineer — Observability, Insights & Governance

About the Role Databricks seeks a senior technical leader to drive strategy and execution across three teams—Query Observability, SQL Warehouse Management, and Account-Level Observability and Governance. This role establishes durable architecture across these surfaces to turn a massive data and AI platform into a trusted, scalable solution. You will set the long-term direction, lead high-impact projects, and shape agentic experiences that enable users and automated systems to investigate, diagnose, and act on telemetry across query, warehouse, workspace, and account levels.

What You'll Do

• Establish the long-term technical direction across query observability, warehouse management, and account-level governance, owning the multi-year architecture.
• Design and lead high-impact projects to improve performance, reliability, and cost transparency for customers.
• Build next-generation agentic observability and governance experiences across query, warehouse, workspace, and account surfaces.
• Partner with Databricks SQL, Unity Catalog, AI, security, and platform teams to integrate end-to-end visibility and governance across data plane and control plane.
• Mentor senior engineers, set technical standards across the group, and recruit top talent into observability, insights, and governance.
• Champion reliable, high-quality software and operational practices for surfaces used by tens of thousands of customers.

What We're Looking For

• 12+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems, observability or governance platforms, databases, or backend infrastructure.
• Proven track record as a technical leader on teams operating in complex, multi-stakeholder environments—driving long-term architecture while delivering incremental customer impact.
• Deep computer science fundamentals (algorithms, data structures, systems design) applied to 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).
• Bonus: experience building agentic experiences using LLMs.

Nice to Have

• Experience building agentic experiences using LLMs.

Compensation & Benefits

• Zone 2 Pay Range: $217,100—$298,550 USD per year.
• The total compensation package may include annual performance bonus, equity, and benefits listed by Databricks.
• Databricks offers comprehensive benefits and a focus on diversity and inclusion.