Senior Incident Manager - California - Databricks Inc.

Description

At Databricks, we are passionate about empowering data teams to tackle the world's most challenging problems — from bringing the next mode of transportation to reality to accelerating the development of medical breakthroughs. We achieve this by building and operating the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform, enabling our customers to leverage deep data insights and enhance their business. Founded by engineers — and customer-obsessed — we leap at every opportunity to tackle technical challenges, from designing next-gen UI/UX for interfacing with data to scaling our services and infrastructure across millions of virtual machines. And we're only getting started.

As a Senior Incident Manager, you will lead Databricks' most critical production incidents while providing clear, accurate, and timely communication to customers, executives, and engineers. You'll serve as both incident commander and reliability engineer; orchestrating multi-team responses, driving real-time status updates, and partnering with engineering to analyze and prevent failures. Your work will ensure Databricks maintains not only technical resilience but also customer and stakeholder confidence during high-impact events.

This role combines operational leadership, technical systems knowledge, and exceptional communication skills. You will be at the intersection of engineering depth and operational clarity, ensuring that every major incident is managed with precision, transparency, and continuous improvement.

The impact you will have here:

• Lead critical incidents — coordinate multi-disciplinary response efforts across Databricks' cloud-based services to rapidly mitigate impact and restore operations.
• Drive technical root cause analysis and Reliability improvements:
• collaborate with engineering teams to trace and document underlying causes across distributed systems, services, and data stores.
• Summarize key learnings, clearly communicate action items, and ensure that technical and procedural improvements are followed through.
• Own communications during incidents — deliver frequent, high-quality updates to internal stakeholders (executives, engineering leadership, support) and compose and publish customer-facing notifications that are accurate, timely, and empathetic.
• Mentor and train peers in both incident communication and technical response disciplines to raise the overall quality of Databricks' incident response.

What are we looking for?

• 5+ years of experience in incident management, site reliability engineering, or production operations supporting large-scale, cloud-native systems.
• Proven ability to lead and coordinate high-severity incidents, including identifying impact, isolating fault domains, and managing multi-team response efforts.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP) — including compute, networking, storage, and observability components.
• Deep expertise in log analysis and debugging.
• Familiarity with log aggregation and search tools (e.g., Datadog, Elasticsearch, Splunk, Cloud Logging, or OpenTelemetry).
• Hands‑on experience with observability systems — metrics, logging, and tracing frameworks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, etc.).
• Proficiency in at least one major programming or scripting language (Python, Go, or Bash) for automating diagnostics, data collection, or analysis.
• Experience developing and maintaining incident playbooks and communication templates to ensure consistent, timely updates.
• Excellent contextual interpretation and writing skills, as well as the ability to effectively summarize and communicate to both technical and business audiences, are required.
• BS, Master's or other advanced degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, or related Engineering field.

Zone 1 Pay Range

$143,300 — $200,600 USD

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

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.