Sr. Manager, Engineering Configuration Platform Team

RDQ427R368 At Databricks, we are passionate about enabling data teams to solve the world's toughest problems — from making the next mode of transportation a reality to accelerating the development of medical breakthroughs. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform so our customers can use deep data insights to improve 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. The Configuration Platform team owns the systems that move configuration and feature flags across every Databricks service. The platform decouples code deployment from feature enablement for thousands of internal engineers, transports configuration across AWS, Azure, and GCP to every Databricks compute surface, and serves 25,000+ active flags and over 300 million evaluations per second at ~10μs p95 latency. It is the primary lever Databricks uses to safely roll out changes, run experiments, and mitigate incidents in minutes instead of hours. We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team within the Configuration Platform organization. This is a hands-on leadership role that combines deep distributed systems judgment with strong people leadership, driving multi-quarter strategy on one of Databricks' most critical stability primitives while continuing to raise the bar for how engineers across the company ship change safely. The impact you will have: You will lead a team that directly shapes how thousands of Databricks engineers ship, ramp, and roll back changes every day You will reduce the rate and blast radius of customer-impacting incidents caused by configuration and feature changes, through stronger guardrails, validation, and graduated rollout patterns You will close the loop between "bad change" and automated mitigation, driving company-wide MTTR down through investments in health-mediated releases, auto-rollback, and zero-downtime configuration delivery You will evolve the Configuration Platform user experience into a frictionless, opinionated set of surfaces (UI, CLI, agentic) where engineers author, review, and roll out changes safely without thinking about the internals You will grow the team into a Staff and Principal attracting org whose technical decisions shape how the company balances speed and reliability What we look for: 5+ years managing backend, infrastructure, or platform teams of roughly 7 to 15 engineers, ideally in service frameworks, feature flags, configuration systems, release safety, production reliability, or other internal platforms Strong distributed systems and infrastructure background: Java/Scala services, RPC and routing layers, configuration systems, Kubernetes-based microservices, and multi-cloud or multi-region deployments Hands-on EM disposition: stays close to the code, leads design reviews, and contributes technically alongside the team. Comfortable leveraging AI-assisted coding tools to amplify their own and the team's output Demonstrated track record managing, growing, and retaining high performing teams Comfortable partnering with senior+ engineers on design reviews, roadmap, and cross-team execution while letting strong ICs own technical details Operational experience owning a high-availability platform with on-call, incident response, and measurable reliability improvements Demonstrated product thinking for developers: shaping opinionated UX, rollout policies, and developer workflows that make the safe path the easy path, with strong taste on the safety versus velocity tradeoff BS in Computer Science (Masters or higher level of education preferred) COVID-19 Vaccination Requirement As a federal government contractor, Databricks requires new U.S. employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Proof of vaccination will be