Staff Software Engineer - Distributed Data Systems · Databricks

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:45:34 GMT
Engineering

Databricks · San Francisco, California · $192,000-$260,000 USD · onsite

At Databricks, we are obsessed with enabling data teams to solve the world's toughest problems. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform, so our customers can focus on the high-value challenges that are central to their own missions.

We develop and operate one of the largest scale software platforms. The fleet consists of millions of virtual machines, generating terabytes of logs and processing exabytes of data per day. At our scale, we regularly observe cloud hardware, network, and operating system faults, and our software must gracefully shield our customers from any of the above.

As a software engineer on the Runtime team at Databricks, you will be building the next generation distributed data storage and processing systems that can outperform specialised SQL query engines in relational query performance, yet provide the expressiveness and programming abstractions to support diverse workloads ranging from ETL to data science.

Below are some example projects:

Apache Spark: Develop the de facto open source standard framework for big data.

Data Plane Storage: Deliver reliable and high-performance services and client libraries for storing and accessing humongous amounts of data on cloud storage backends, e.g., AWS S3, Azure Blob Store.

Delta Lake: A storage management system that combines the scale and cost-efficiency of data lakes, the performance and reliability of a data warehouse, and the low latency of streaming.

Delta Pipelines: It's difficult to manage even a single data engineering pipeline. The goal of the Delta Pipelines project is to make it simple and possible to orchestrate and operate tens of thousands of data pipelines.

Performance Engineering: Build the next generation query optimizer and execution engine that's fast, tuning-free, scalable, and robust.

What we look for:

BS in Computer Science, related technical field or equivalent practical experience.

Optional: MS or PhD in databases, distributed systems.

Comfortable working towards a multi-year vision with incremental deliverables.

Driven by delivering customer value and impact.

8+ years of production-level experience in either Java, Scala, or C++.

Strong foundation in algorithms and data structures and their real-world use cases.

Experience with distributed systems, databases, and big data systems (Apache Spark, Hadoop).

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.