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Databricks

Sr. Software Engineer - Ingestion Core team

Databricks is hiring a Sr. Software Engineer - Ingestion Core team in San Francisco, United States. It pays $166k-$225k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Databricks.

Level's read on this job

  • Level rates this software engineer role Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
  • The listed pay starts close to the typical software engineer posting on Level.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include Java, Scala and Go.
  • Level classifies it as a senior role.
  • Level lists 900 other open roles at Databricks.

AI in this role

Senior software engineer building distributed ingestion infrastructure and optimizing streaming data workloads to power AI and data use cases.

javascalagocpythonsparkdelta-lake
ragai-agentsdistributed-systemsstreaming-datadata-ingestioncloud-storagebackend

Deeply understanding what’s in the enterprise data has been a challenge that Databricks has been addressing by providing analytics and machine learning tools. From data warehousing with Databricks SQL to large-scale distributed processing with Spark and advanced ML tools for experimentation and model serving, we empower our customers to gain insights and drive innovation.

 

To enable all of this on Databricks, making data ingestion seamless is crucial. That’s the mission of the Ingestion Core Team: to make the ingestion of all data—structured and unstructured—simple, reliable, and efficient. Simplifying the complex is hard, and that’s where you come in. This role requires building distributed platform systems to incrementally ingest high-volume, petabyte-scale data from diverse sources—including cloud storage (SQS, ADLS, GCS), databases (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres), and file sources (Google Drive, SharePoint)—at high throughput and low cost. The data includes structured formats (JSON, Parquet, CSV) as well as unstructured data (text, images, docs, PPTs, and blobs), all of which land in Delta Lake with schema evolution and change data capture (CDC) capabilities.

 

Join us in making data ingestion effortless and be part of the team that powers the future of AI + data at Databricks!

 

As an engineer on the team, you will work on projects that:

  • Build distributed infrastructure to ingest data from diverse sources and support streaming ingestion, incremental processing, and replication. This isn’t just about building plugin connectors.
  • Reduce end-to-end latency, increase throughput, and reduce costs from the time data appears in source systems to when it is available in Delta Lake.
  • Design and optimize streaming and distributed workloads for throughput, cost, latency, reliability, and scale.
  • Optimize streaming workloads by exploring and applying ML techniques.
  • Build monitoring and observability capabilities (customer-facing and internal) that provide visibility into ingestion workflows and the systems running them.
  • Collaborate with partner teams to enable use cases like RAG and AI agents.
  • Build Agentic SDKs with strong evaluations.

 

Ideal Engineer should have:

  • 5+ years of experience writing production code in one of: Java, Scala, Go, C++, or Python.
  • Experience architecting, developing, and deploying large-scale distributed and asynchronous systems.
  • Experience with distributed systems, streaming, Spark, databases, data processing, or CDC.
  • Experience building or operating systems where scale, throughput, latency, reliability, and cost are important considerations.
  • Comfortable using AI tools and defining effective evals to shorten the development loop.

 

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$166,000—$225,000 USD

About Databricks

Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 20,000 organizations worldwide — including adidas, AT&T, Bayer, Block, Mastercard, Rivian, Unilever, and 70% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data + AI Platform to build and scale data and AI apps, analytics and agents. Headquartered in San Francisco with 30+ offices around the globe, Databricks offers a unified platform that includes Genie, Lakebase, Agent Bricks, Lakeflow, Lakehouse, and Unity Catalog. To learn more, follow Databricks on LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and Instagram.

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.

How we rate this

Sr. Software Engineer - Ingestion Core team at Databricks rates 65 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

RAGAI agentsDistributed SystemsStreaming DataData IngestionCloud StorageBackendJava

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$166k
Typical software engineer job
$167k

This posting starts close to the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
  2. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  3. Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where streaming data was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Tell me about a project where data ingestion was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: RAG, AI agents, Distributed Systems, Streaming Data, and Data Ingestion. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.

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