Senior Staff Platform/Data Reliability Engineer

Who you are

• 12+ years of relevant experience in data platform engineering, platform operations, site reliability engineering, or modern cloud data infrastructure
• Hands-on experience with Databricks or a closely related cloud data platform in production environments
• Experience designing or operating CI/CD, environment promotion, version control, and deployment automation for data platforms and pipelines
• Strong understanding of platform operations concepts such as observability, monitoring, alerting, incident management, and reliability engineering
• Experience with compute policy design, workload isolation, service principals, and secure production execution patterns on cloud data platforms
• Ability to work effectively in a regulated or security-sensitive environment with strong expectations around access control, auditability, and operational discipline
• Strong collaboration skills and comfort partnering with cloud/infrastructure, security, data engineering, and analytics stakeholders
• Databricks certification and/or strong demonstrated expertise with Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Workflows, and Databricks Asset Bundles
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and platform automation in enterprise environments
• Experience supporting commercial and government or otherwise segregated environments with different compliance and access requirements
• Experience in defense, aerospace, federal, or another regulated industry

What the job involves

• The Sr.Staff Platform / Data Reliability Engineer is responsible for making Databricks a reliable, secure, scalable, and operationally mature platform for enterprise use
• This role focuses on the platform itself rather than domain-specific business modeling, ensuring the lakehouse can support multiple domains, regulated data handling, and a growing set of production workloads without becoming fragile, expensive, or hard to govern
• This role partners closely with the Senior Staff Data Engineer, who focuses more heavily on ingestion and medallion implementation patterns, and with the existing Cloud & Infrastructure team, which owns cloud accounts, networking, and foundational infrastructure
• The Platform / Data Reliability Engineer owns the Databricks operational layer that sits above that foundation: reliability, observability, deployment standards, compute and job policies, and platform enablement patterns for internal users
• Own operational excellence for the Databricks platform, including monitoring, alerting, observability, incident response support, and production runbook patterns for data jobs and platform services
• Define and maintain CI/CD and promotion standards for Databricks assets, including workflows, jobs, notebooks, code packages, infrastructure configuration, and environment promotion from dev to prod
• Design and maintain platform standards for job orchestration, cluster and compute policies, service principal usage, environment isolation, and production execution reliability
• Establish reusable operational templates and enablement patterns for new domains onboarding to Databricks, including logging conventions, job tagging, metadata capture, and support handoff expectations
• Partner with the Senior Data Engineer to ensure ingestion and medallion patterns are implemented in a way that is observable, recoverable, cost-aware, and secure in production
• Work with the cloud/infrastructure team to align Databricks configuration and usage patterns with broader enterprise cloud standards, especially where commercial and future government-hosted environments are involved
• Help enforce technical controls for data segregation, access boundaries, and operational compliance in a highly regulated environment
• Track and improve platform health metrics such as job success rates, incident trends, data pipeline reliability, cost efficiency, and environment drift
• Document platform standards, operational expectations, and support models so the Databricks platform can scale beyond a small founding team
• Mentor internal engineers who are growing into platform responsibilities, helping expand Databricks operational knowledge within the team

Benefits

• Excellent Medical Coverage
• Mental Health Employee Assistance Program
• Paid Parental Leave
• Pet Insurance
• Flexible Work Hours
• Gym Discount (San Diego)
• Onsite Gym (DC)
• Free Parking
• Competitive Compensation
• 401K Services and Match
• Stock Benefits