Staff Software Engineer, Lakeflow Pipelines DR
RDQ427R70
Our mission at Databricks is to radically simplify the data lifecycle with a unified Lakehouse platform for data engineering, analytics, and AI. The Lakehouse addresses major challenges in enterprise data platforms, including reliability, data staleness, operational complexity, total cost of ownership, and data lock-in. Learn more about the Lakehouse architecture.
Lakeflow is a critical part of this vision, helping customers build and operate streaming and batch ETL pipelines that power business-critical data products. As these workloads become increasingly mission-critical, customers need them to continue operating through infrastructure failures and cloud-region outages.
As a Staff Engineer on the part of the Lakeflow Disaster Recovery team, you will design and implement distributed systems that replicate and recover pipelines across regions. A pipeline is more than source code and output tables: it includes streaming checkpoints, source offsets, stateful operator state, table versions, transaction metadata, schedules, and dependencies across a dataflow graph. You will solve challenging problems involving consistency, idempotency, causal ordering, failover, failback, and safe recovery without silent data loss or duplication.
You will work in one or more of the following areas:
Cross-region replication and recovery for Lakeflow pipelines, streaming tables, and materialized views
Distributed consistency across pipeline dependencies, table versions, and transaction logs
Failover and failback workflows with conservative correctness guardrails
Deep clone, metadata reconciliation, observability, and failure-injection testing
High-fidelity recovery simulations, game-day testing, and formal reasoning about failure modes
What we look for:
A passion for distributed systems, databases, storage systems, streaming systems, or reliability engineering
Strong software engineering skills in Java, Scala, C++, Go, Python, or a similar production language
Understanding of consistency, transactions, idempotency, replication, checkpointing, and data lineage
Ability to define and work toward a multi-year technical vision with incremental, production-quality deliverables
8+ years of experience working on related systems preferred
Optional: PhD or advanced research experience in databases, distributed systems, or storage
This role offers the opportunity to build the foundations of resilient Lakehouse computing and help customers keep their data pipelines running when failure matters most.
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
$192,000—$260,000 USD