Strategic Overview
Sr. Manager, Engineering Configuration Platform Team at Databricks is a dev opportunity centered on the specialist responsibilities and outcomes described in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as You will lead a team that directly shapes how thousands of Databricks engineers ship, ramp, and roll back changes every day Comfortable partnering with senior+ engineers on design reviews, roadmap, and cross-team execution while letting strong ICs own….
The role is listed for Bellevue, Washington 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
RDQ427R368
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. Founded by engineers — and customer obsessed —…
The Configuration Platform team owns the systems that move configuration and feature flags across every Databricks service. The platform decouples code deployment from feature enablement for thousands of internal engineers, transports configuration across AWS, Azure, and GCP to every Databricks compute surface, and serves 25,000+ active flags and over 300 million evaluations per second at ~10μs p95 latency. It is…
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- You will lead a team that directly shapes how thousands of Databricks engineers ship, ramp, and roll back changes every day
- Comfortable partnering with senior+ engineers on design reviews, roadmap, and cross-team execution while letting strong ICs own technical details
Required Qualifications & Candidate Blueprint
- Hands-on EM disposition: stays close to the code, leads design reviews, and contributes technically alongside the team. Comfortable leveraging AI-assisted coding tools to amplify their own and the team's output
- Demonstrated track record managing, growing, and retaining high performing teams
- Demonstrated product thinking for developers: shaping opinionated UX, rollout policies, and developer workflows that make the safe path the easy path, with strong taste on the safety versus velocity tradeoff
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: $222,000 – $300,000 USD
- You will close the loop between "bad change" and automated mitigation, driving company-wide MTTR down through investments in health-mediated releases, auto-rollback, and zero-downtime configuration delivery
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.
RDQ427R368
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. Founded by engineers — and customer obsessed — we leap at every opportunity to tackle technical challenges, from designing next-gen UI/UX for interfacing with data to scaling our services and infrastructure across millions of virtual machines. And we're only getting started.
The Configuration Platform team owns the systems that move configuration and feature flags across every Databricks service. The platform decouples code deployment from feature enablement for thousands of internal engineers, transports configuration across AWS, Azure, and GCP to every Databricks compute surface, and serves 25,000+ active flags and over 300 million evaluations per second at ~10μs p95 latency. It is the primary lever Databricks uses to safely roll out changes, run experiments, and mitigate incidents in minutes instead of hours.
We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team within the Configuration Platform organization. This is a hands-on leadership role that combines deep distributed systems judgment with strong people leadership, driving multi-quarter strategy on one of Databricks' most critical stability primitives while continuing to raise the bar for how engineers across the company ship change safely.
The impact you will have:
- You will lead a team that directly shapes how thousands of Databricks engineers ship, ramp, and roll back changes every day
- You will reduce the rate and blast radius of customer-impacting incidents caused by configuration and feature changes, through stronger guardrails, validation, and graduated rollout patterns
- You will close the loop between "bad change" and automated mitigation, driving company-wide MTTR down through investments in health-mediated releases, auto-rollback, and zero-downtime configuration delivery
- You will evolve the Configuration Platform user experience into a frictionless, opinionated set of surfaces (UI, CLI, agentic) where engineers author, review, and roll out changes safely without thinking about the internals
- You will grow the team into a Staff and Principal attracting org whose technical decisions shape how the company balances speed and reliability
What we look for:
- 5+ years managing backend, infrastructure, or platform teams of roughly 7 to 15 engineers, ideally in service frameworks, feature flags, configuration systems, release safety, production reliability, or other 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 the code, leads design reviews, and contributes technically alongside the team. Comfortable leveraging AI-assisted coding tools to amplify their own and the team's output
- Demonstrated track record managing, growing, and retaining high performing teams
- Comfortable partnering with senior+ engineers on design reviews, roadmap, 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 strong taste on the safety versus velocity tradeoff
- BS in Computer Science (Masters or higher level of education preferred)
COVID-19 Vaccination Requirement
As a federal government contractor, Databricks requires new U.S. employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Proof of vaccination will be required as a condition of employment. Databricks will make reasonable accommodations based on medical conditions or religious grounds for qualified candidates in accordance with applicable law.
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 dev 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 You will lead a team that directly shapes how thousands of Databricks engineers ship, ramp, and roll back changes every day — 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.
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