Sr. Staff Software Engineer — Observability, Insights & Governance

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

About the Role Databricks is seeking a Sr. Staff Software Engineer to lead strategy and execution across three closely related teams at the heart of our observability and governance mission: Query Observability, SQL Warehouse Management, and Account-Level Observability and Governance. This new technical leadership role will set durable architecture across surfaces, raise the engineering bar, and shape agentic experiences that enable users and systems to investigate, diagnose, and act on insights 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, and own the multi-year architecture.
• 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, workspace, 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 We're Looking For

• 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).
• Bonus: experience building agentic experiences using LLMs.

Nice to Have

• Experience building agentic experiences using LLMs.

Compensation & Benefits

• Zone 1 Pay Range: USD 228,600 — 314,250.
• The total compensation package may include annual performance bonus, equity, and benefits.
• Benefits details vary by region; refer to the company benefits page for specifics.