Staff Software Engineer, Technical Lead, Lakebase Manager (LBM)

P-988
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 solve 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.

Lakebase enables teams to deliver applications faster with an optimized database developer experience, integration with the lakehouse, and simplified operations. It provides a managed Postgres transactional layer for application state and workloads that combine operational data, analytics, and AI. You'll join as one of the key engineers building out the Lakebase product.

As the Technical Lead on the Lakebase Manager (LBM) team, you will drive, build, and operate the central control plane that owns the core logic for Lakebase: database creation and deletion, wake-up and suspend, maintaining computes on hot standby, HA failover, and more. LBM interacts with every Lakebase component (storage, compute, proxy, and console) and manages the full database lifecycle at scale, with a focus on reliability. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role: you lead the team technically and partner with the team's engineering manager, who owns people management and delivery planning. The stack is Go, Rust, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes.

The impact you will have:

• Set the technical direction for LBM and own the quality and reliability of what the team ships, driving execution on the hardest, highest-risk parts.
• Drive architecture and design, and write code on the hardest parts of your team's projects.
• Set and uphold high technical standards through architecture reviews, testing, and a culture of engineering excellence.
• Raise the technical bar of the team: mentor engineers, drive rigorous design and code review, and grow their distributed-systems and design skills.
• Define SLIs, meet SLOs, and drive long-term reliability improvements across the database lifecycle.
• Lead cross-team initiatives across the Lakebase stack: align with partner teams on dependencies and unblock cross-cutting projects.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to shape and deliver a long-term technical roadmap.

What we look for:

• 8+ years designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, including the processes around testing, monitoring, and SLIs/SLOs.
• A track record of technical leadership as an individual contributor: setting architecture and direction for a team's projects through influence, without formal management authority.
• Strong hands-on depth: you still design systems and write production code, and can go deep on architecture for large-scale distributed services.
• Experience operating reliability-critical, highly available services (on-call, incident response, HA/failover).
• Comfortable working toward a multi-year vision with incremental deliverables, and balancing short-term delivery against long-term stability.
• Ability to align multiple stakeholders on competing priorities.
• Motivated by delivering customer value and impact.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, or a similar systems language; experience with PostgreSQL and Kubernetes is a plus.
• BS (or higher) in Computer Science, or a related field.