Sr. Manager, Engineering - Model Serving

RDQ127R51

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.

Databricks’ Model Serving product provides enterprises with a unified, scalable, and governed platform to deploy and manage AI/ML models — from traditional ML to fine-tuned and proprietary large language models. It offers real-time, low-latency inference, governance, monitoring, and lineage. As AI adoption accelerates, Model Serving is a core pillar of the Databricks platform, enabling customers to operationalize models at scale with strong SLAs and cost efficiency.

As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead the team owning both the product experience and the foundational infrastructure of Model Serving — shaping customer-facing capabilities while designing for scalability, extensibility, and performance across both CPU and GPU inference — and collaborate closely across the platform, product, infrastructure, and research organizations.

The impact you will have:

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team responsible for both the customer-facing Model Serving product and its foundational infrastructure — covering runtime, APIs, scaling, reliability, and integrations.

• Define and own the product and technical roadmap for Model Serving, balancing customer experience, functionality, and foundational investments across deployment, inference, monitoring, and scaling.

• Collaborate closely with product, research, platform, and infrastructure teams to drive end-to-end delivery — from ideation and prioritization to launch and operation.

• Ensure Model Serving meets stringent SLAs, SLOs, and performance and reliability goals, continuously improving operational efficiency and customer experience.

• Drive architectural decisions and product design around latency, throughput, autoscaling, GPU/CPU placement, and cost optimization.

• Advocate for customer needs through direct engagement, ensuring engineering decisions translate to clear product impact.

• Promote best practices in code quality, testing, observability, and operational readiness.

• Foster a culture of excellence, inclusion, and continuous improvement across the team.

• Partner with recruiting to attract, hire, and develop top-tier engineering talent.

What we look for:

• 5+ years of experience in technical leadership or management.

• Proven track record building and operating large-scale distributed systems, preferably real-time or low-latency APIs.

• Deep understanding of real-time serving systems.

• Experience driving architectural design and operational excellence for production systems with measurable SLAs and SLOs.

• Familiarity with CPU/GPU performance optimization, concurrency, caching, and scalability concepts.

• Excellent collaboration and communication skills across engineering, product, and research organizations.

• Ability to lead teams through ambiguity and deliver complex, cross-functional projects.

• BS in Computer Science (Masters or PhD Preferred).

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. For more information regarding which range your location is in visit our page here.

Local Pay Range

$217,000—$312,200 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 click here.

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.