Senior Incident Manager

At Databricks, we are passionate about empowering data teams to tackle the world’s most challenging problems — from bringing the next mode of transportation to reality to accelerating the development of medical breakthroughs. We achieve this by building and operating the world’s best data and AI infrastructure platform, enabling our customers to leverage deep data insights and enhance 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.

As a Senior Incident Manager, you will lead Databricks’ most critical production incidents while providing clear, accurate, and timely communication to customers, executives, and engineers. You’ll serve as both incident commander and reliability engineer; orchestrating multi-team responses, driving real-time status updates, and partnering with engineering to analyze and prevent failures. Your work will ensure Databricks maintains not only technical resilience but also customer and stakeholder confidence during high-impact events.

This role combines operational leadership, technical systems knowledge, and exceptional communication skills. You will be at the intersection of engineering depth and operational clarity, ensuring that every major incident is managed with precision, transparency, and continuous improvement.

The impact you will have here:

• Lead critical incidents — coordinate multi-disciplinary response efforts across Databricks’ cloud-based services to rapidly mitigate impact and restore operations.
• Drive technical root cause analysis and Reliability improvements:
• collaborate with engineering teams to trace and document underlying causes across distributed systems, services, and data stores.
• Summarize key learnings, clearly communicate action items, and ensure that technical and procedural improvements are followed through.
• Own communications during incidents — deliver frequent, high-quality updates to internal stakeholders (executives, engineering leadership, support) and compose and publish customer-facing notifications that are accurate, timely, and empathetic.
• Mentor and train peers in both incident communication and technical response disciplines to raise the overall quality of Databricks’ incident response.

What are we looking for?

• 5+ years of experience in incident management, site reliability engineering, or production operations supporting large-scale, cloud-native systems.
• Proven ability to lead and coordinate high-severity incidents, including identifying impact, isolating fault domains, and managing multi-team response efforts.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP) — including compute, networking, storage, and observability components.
• Deep expertise in log analysis and debugging:
• Familiarity with log aggregation and search tools (e.g., Datadog, Elasticsearch, Splunk, Cloud Logging, or OpenTelemetry).
• Hands-on experience with observability systems — metrics, logging, and tracing frameworks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, etc.).
• Proficiency in at least one major programming or scripting language (Python, Go, or Bash) for automating diagnostics, data collection, or analysis.
• Experience developing and maintaining incident playbooks and communication templates to ensure consistent, timely updates.
• Excellent contextual interpretation and writing skills, as well as the ability to effectively summarize and communicate to both technical and business audiences, are required.
• BS, Master's or other advanced degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, or related Engineering field.