Strategic Overview
Senior Engineering Manager for Workspace Platform at Databricks is a leadership opportunity centered on the specialist responsibilities and outcomes described in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as Strategy & Vision : Define and drive the technical strategy for the Workspace Platform, including building over 16 shared capabilities that underpin the entire Databricks experience. Execution Ownership : Own the roadmap, execution, and delivery for the…
The role is listed for San Francisco, California with the working arrangement published with the role, giving candidates the practical context needed to assess fit before applying.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
RDQ225R488
At Databricks, we are passionate about enabling data teams to solve the world's toughest problems — from making the next mode of transportation a reality to accelerating the development of medical breakthroughs. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform so our customers can use deep data insights to improve their business.
The Workspace Platform team is on an ambitious mission to scale our customer base 100x and support the future of agentic AI workloads. Our goal is to build a unified, consistent, and foundational Shared Platform for the entire Databricks Workspace experience.
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- Strategy & Vision : Define and drive the technical strategy for the Workspace Platform, including building over 16 shared capabilities that underpin the entire Databricks experience.
- Execution Ownership : Own the roadmap, execution, and delivery for the platform, ensuring all team deliverables meet the highest standards of quality and timeliness.
- Engineering Excellence: Establish and enforce team best practices for engineering excellence, including design reviews, code quality, testing strategies, and performance optimizations for high-volume distributed systems.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with teams across the organization, including those developing vertical product experiences (Lakehouse Platform, SQL Warehouse, AI/BI Dashboards, UC Platform) and core infrastructure, to ensure seamless integration and innovation.
Required Qualifications & Candidate Blueprint
- Experience: 15+ years of software engineering experience with a strong track record of technical leadership and impact.
- Familiarity with building services on top of containerization technologies.
- Expertise in distributed systems, major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), and modern web application architectures.
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: $217,000 – $312,200 USD
- Strategy & Vision : Define and drive the technical strategy for the Workspace Platform, including building over 16 shared capabilities that underpin the entire Databricks experience.
Salary Benchmark
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Benchmark uses active employer job postings in our database and excludes this listing. It is not a third-party salary estimate, and currencies are not converted.
Full Job Description
The following is the complete job description supplied by the source. We sanitize unsafe markup and remove external links, but do not shorten or rewrite the employer's source content.
RDQ225R488
At Databricks, we are passionate about enabling data teams to solve the world's toughest problems — from making the next mode of transportation a reality to accelerating the development of medical breakthroughs. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform so our customers can use deep data insights to improve their business.
The Workspace Platform team is on an ambitious mission to scale our customer base 100x and support the future of agentic AI workloads. Our goal is to build a unified, consistent, and foundational Shared Platform for the entire Databricks Workspace experience.
As a Senior Engineering Manager on the Workspace Platform team, you will lead the development of unified infrastructure powering critical customer-facing capabilities across multiple Databricks products, including Content Discovery (akin to Google Search), Content Organization (akin to Google Drive), Collaborative code editing, and Repository management (akin to Github). This is a high-impact, exciting opportunity to guide a team of ~20 software engineers in creating platform features, intuitive workspace experiences, and partner integrations that are essential to Databricks' expansion and user adoption.
The impact you will have:
- Strategy & Vision: Define and drive the technical strategy for the Workspace Platform, including building over 16 shared capabilities that underpin the entire Databricks experience.
- Execution Ownership: Own the roadmap, execution, and delivery for the platform, ensuring all team deliverables meet the highest standards of quality and timeliness.
- Engineering Excellence: Establish and enforce team best practices for engineering excellence, including design reviews, code quality, testing strategies, and performance optimizations for high-volume distributed systems.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with teams across the organization, including those developing vertical product experiences (Lakehouse Platform, SQL Warehouse, AI/BI Dashboards, UC Platform) and core infrastructure, to ensure seamless integration and innovation.
What we look for:
- Experience: 15+ years of software engineering experience with a strong track record of technical leadership and impact.
- Management: 5+ years of engineering management experience, including experience managing other managers.
- Scaling: Proven experience scaling engineering teams from 10 to 30+ engineers.
- Platform Expertise: Experience leading platform teams and backend developers in a SaaS environment.
- Technical Depth:
- Experience designing and building scalable distributed systems.
- Familiarity with building services on top of containerization technologies.
- Expertise in distributed systems, major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), and modern web application architectures.
- Collaboration: Strong ability to collaborate across product, engineering, and business teams to align technical strategy with core company growth objectives.
- Passion: A passion for building and scaling robust, high-performance platforms.
Pay Range Transparency
Databricks is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range(s) for this role is listed below and represents the expected salary range for non-commissionable roles or on-target earnings for commissionable roles. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to job-related skills, depth of experience, relevant certifications and training, and specific work location. Based on the factors above, Databricks anticipates utilizing the full width of the range. The total compensation package for this position may also include eligibility for annual performance bonus, equity, and the benefits listed above. For more information regarding which range your location is in visit our page here.
About Databricks
Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 20,000 organizations worldwide — including adidas, AT&T, Bayer, Block, Mastercard, Rivian, Unilever, and 70% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data + AI Platform to build and scale data and AI apps, analytics and agents. Headquartered in San Francisco with 30+ offices around the globe, Databricks offers a unified platform that includes Genie, Lakebase, Agent Bricks, Lakeflow, Lakehouse, and Unity Catalog. To learn more, follow Databricks on LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and Instagram.
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.
Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
At Databricks, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can excel. We take great care to ensure that our hiring practices are inclusive and meet equal employment opportunity standards. Individuals looking for employment at Databricks are considered without regard to age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other protected characteristics.
Compliance
If access to export-controlled technology or source code is required for performance of job duties, it is within Employer's discretion whether to apply for a U.S. government license for such positions, and Employer may decline to proceed with an applicant on this basis alone.
Editor’s Market Perspective (Our Custom Analysis)
Why This Position Matters
This leadership opening is a useful opportunity for candidates whose experience matches the role-specific capabilities named in the listing. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly Strategy & Vision : Define and drive the technical strategy for the Workspace Platform, including building over 16 shared capabilities that underpin the entire Databricks experience. — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
For the application, mirror the employer's language where it truthfully matches your background: foreground the role-specific capabilities named in the listing, quantify outcomes from comparable work, and place the most relevant experience near the top of the resume. If the listing specifies tools, platforms, leadership scope, or domain experience, use those exact terms in context instead of presenting an unrelated keyword list.
We organize source-provided information into this independent job-seeker overview. Compensation is shown only when the source provides it; the official listing remains the authority for current requirements and application instructions.