Staff Software Engineer - Databases

At Databricks, we build powerful infrastructure that accelerates innovation and enables data teams to deliver with confidence and scale. Our unified schema migration platform underpins automated, observable, and developer-friendly workflows—ensuring Databricks can continue evolving rapidly across thousands of databases and 60+ mission-critical services.

What You’ll Do

As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll lead the design, development, and reliability of our global platform that manages schema and data changes at scale:

• Schema Migration Platform: Architecting and maintaining automated schema change infrastructure for MySQL and TiDB, while implementing versioning, rollback, validation, and auditing for safe, predictable, and fast migrations.
• Scale, Reliability & Test Harness: Ensuring the platform operates across thousands of global databases with zero downtime, enhancing resilience, observability, and recovery, and building a test harness for migration and deployment validation.
• Developer Experience & CI/CD Integration: Designing intuitive tools and APIs for seamless schema and data change management, and embedding migration workflows into CI/CD pipelines to increase velocity and reduce friction.
• Schema & Data management: Designing infrastructure for safe, large-scale schema and data operations like backfills and purging. This includes ensuring backfill operations are monitored, retryable, minimally disruptive, and automated to align with schema/data evolution and maintain data integrity.

Your role will be crucial in:

• Ensuring the scalability and reliability of schema and data operations across Databricks’ global footprint.
• Driving predictable deployments by architecting robust test harnesses and automation.
• Elevating the developer experience by building accessible, resilient tools that make complex migrations feel simple.
• Guaranteeing the integrity of both schema and data through safe, efficient backfill strategies.

What we look for:

• 12+ years of professional experience in backend systems or platform engineering.
• Experience in building platforms, infrastructure, or database engineering, especially with MySQL, TiDB.
• Track record of building and scaling mission-critical platforms supporting high-throughput, global services.
• Experience with schema migration frameworks, CI/CD automation and developer tooling.
• Champion of developer experience, creating clear, reliable, and user-friendly workflows.

About Databricks

Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 10,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, Grammarly, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify and democratize data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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, please visit https://www.mybenefitsnow.com/databricks.

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.