Sr. Staff Platform/Data Reliability Engineer, Databricks

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Sr. Staff Platform/Data Reliability Engineer, Databricks based in United States.

This is a senior technical leadership opportunity focused on making Databricks a reliable, secure, scalable, and operationally mature enterprise platform. You will own the operational layer supporting a growing lakehouse environment across multiple data domains and production workloads. The role spans reliability engineering, observability, CI/CD, deployment standards, compute governance, and platform enablement. You’ll work closely with data engineering, cloud infrastructure, security, and analytics teams to establish robust production practices. Your work will be particularly important in regulated and security-sensitive environments where access control, auditability, and segregation are critical. You’ll help create reusable standards and operational patterns that allow the platform to scale efficiently beyond its founding team. This role also offers the opportunity to mentor engineers and shape the long-term reliability strategy of a modern cloud data platform.

Accountabilities:: Own operational excellence for the Databricks platform, including monitoring, alerting, observability, incident response support, and production runbooks for data jobs and platform services.

Define and maintain CI/CD, version control, deployment, and environment-promotion standards for Databricks workflows, jobs, notebooks, code packages, and infrastructure configuration.

Establish reliable promotion practices across development, testing, and production environments.

Design and maintain standards for job orchestration, cluster and compute policies, service-principal usage, workload isolation, and secure production execution.

Develop reusable operational templates and onboarding patterns for new data domains, including logging conventions, job tagging, metadata capture, and support handoff processes.

Partner with senior data engineering stakeholders to ensure ingestion and medallion architectures are observable, recoverable, cost-efficient, and secure in production.

Collaborate with cloud and infrastructure teams to align Databricks configurations and usage with broader enterprise cloud standards across commercial and future government-hosted environments.

Help implement technical controls for data segregation, access boundaries, auditability, and operational compliance within regulated environments.

Monitor and improve platform health indicators such as job success rates, pipeline reliability, incident trends, cost efficiency, and environment drift.

Establish clear platform standards, operational expectations, documentation, and support models that enable sustainable scaling.

Mentor engineers developing platform expertise and help expand operational knowledge across the broader engineering organization.

Requirements:

12+ years of relevant experience in data platform engineering, platform operations, site reliability engineering, or modern cloud data infrastructure.

Hands-on experience operating Databricks or a comparable cloud data platform in production environments.

Strong experience designing or managing CI/CD pipelines, environment promotion, version control, and deployment automation for data platforms and pipelines.

Deep understanding of observability, monitoring, alerting, incident management, production support, and reliability engineering principles.

Experience designing compute policies, workload isolation, service-principal models, and secure production execution patterns on cloud data platforms.

Strong understanding of access control, auditability, security, and operational discipline in regulated or security-sensitive environments.

Ability to collaborate effectively with cloud/infrastructure, security, data engineering, analytics, and other technical stakeholders.

Databricks certification and/or demonstrated expertise with Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Workflows, and Databricks Asset Bundles is preferred.

Experience with infrastructure-as-code and platform automation in enterprise environments is a plus.

Experience supporting commercial and government environments, or other segregated environments with different compliance and access requirements, is preferred.

Experience in defense, aerospace, federal, or another highly regulated industry is advantageous.

Strong communication, mentoring, documentation, and technical leadership skills, with the ability to establish standards and influence engineering practices.

Benefits:

Base salary range of $180,000–$270,000 per year , with actual compensation determined by factors including skills, experience, certifications, and work location.

Full-time regular employees receive base pay within the listed range plus bonus, benefits, and equity .

Temporary employees receive compensation within the listed range plus an applicable temporary benefits package after 60 days of employment.

Opportunity to work on advanced, mission-critical technology in a highly technical and security-sensitive environment.

Exposure to complex cloud data platforms and production systems spanning commercial and government-oriented requirements.

Opportunities for technical leadership, mentoring, and long-term platform strategy ownership.

Equal opportunity workplace committed to an inclusive environment and supporting reasonable accommodations.

Employment offers are contingent on a cleared background and, where applicable, reference checks.

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