Staff Software Engineer - Databases

Who you are

You have 5+ years of experience in software engineering, particularly in building and maintaining large-scale systems. Your background includes a deep understanding of database technologies, specifically MySQL and TiDB, and you have a proven track record of architecting reliable and scalable solutions. You are adept at designing intuitive tools and APIs that enhance developer experience and streamline workflows.

Your expertise in CI/CD practices allows you to integrate migration workflows seamlessly into deployment pipelines, ensuring that changes are delivered with speed and minimal disruption. You understand the importance of data integrity and have experience implementing versioning, rollback, validation, and auditing processes to safeguard data during migrations.

You thrive in environments where you can enhance system reliability and observability. Your experience includes building test harnesses for migration and deployment validation, ensuring that platforms operate with zero downtime. You are passionate about creating developer-friendly workflows that empower teams to manage schema and data changes effectively.

Desirable

Experience with automated schema change infrastructure is a plus, as is familiarity with monitoring and retry mechanisms for backfill operations. You are comfortable working in a collaborative environment and enjoy mentoring junior engineers, sharing your knowledge and best practices to foster a culture of continuous improvement.

What you'll do

In this role, you will lead the design and development of Databricks' Schema Migration Platform, focusing on architecting and maintaining automated schema change infrastructure for MySQL and TiDB. You will implement critical features such as versioning, rollback, validation, and auditing to ensure safe and predictable migrations. Your work will directly impact the scalability and reliability of the platform, which manages schema and data changes across thousands of global databases.

You will enhance the platform's resilience and observability, ensuring it operates with zero downtime. This includes building a robust test harness for migration and deployment validation, allowing for thorough testing before changes are applied in production. You will also design intuitive tools and APIs that facilitate seamless schema and data change management, embedding these workflows into CI/CD pipelines to increase velocity and reduce friction for development teams.

Your responsibilities will also include designing infrastructure for safe, large-scale schema and data operations, such as backfills and purging. You will ensure that these operations are monitored, retryable, and minimally disruptive, aligning with schema and data evolution while maintaining data integrity. Your role will be crucial in ensuring that Databricks continues to evolve rapidly across its mission-critical services.

What we offer

At Databricks, you will be part of a team that is dedicated to building powerful infrastructure that accelerates innovation. We offer a collaborative work environment where you can grow your skills and make a significant impact on our platform and the data teams that rely on it. You will have the opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies and contribute to the development of solutions that empower organizations to deliver with confidence and scale. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't match every requirement, as we value diverse perspectives and backgrounds.