Senior Designated Support Engineer

About the role

As a Senior Designated Support Engineer and technical subject‑matter expert, you will work closely with Databricks’ Field and Engineering teams to provide high‑touch, specialized support for the company’s largest and most strategic Digital Native Business customers. You will use deep expertise in Apache Spark and related data technologies to triage, resolve, and unblock critical technical challenges.

Key responsibilities

• Perform advanced troubleshooting and root‑cause analysis for performance and reliability issues in Spark, SQL, Delta, Streaming and Databricks runtime using tools such as Spark UI, DAGs and event logs.
• Collaborate with R&D and NOC teams to define continuous‑monitoring requirements and optimise customer environments.
• Build rapid proof‑of‑concepts, test, deploy and monitor solutions engineered by Databricks to address customer challenges.
• Create and maintain playbooks and a knowledge base for common Spark, ML and AI workflow issues.
• Train customer engineering and business teams on performance tuning, debugging and best‑practice usage of Databricks features.
• Act as trusted advisor in business review meetings, champion process improvements and coordinate cross‑functional teams to enhance the customer experience.

Required profile

• 5‑8 years designing, building and troubleshooting distributed computing applications; 4+ years delivering production‑scale Spark/ML/AI solutions.
• Hands‑on experience with data lakes, SQL databases and cloud data‑warehousing/ETL tools such as Snowflake, Redshift or BigQuery.
• Deep knowledge of Spark core internals, Delta/Iceberg, JVM optimisation and memory management, plus familiarity with machine‑learning, deep‑learning and generative‑AI ecosystems.
• Practical experience with AWS, Azure or GCP and building CI/CD pipelines, monitoring and alerting systems.
• 3‑5 years in customer‑facing roles (e.g., Technical Account Manager or Solutions Architect) demonstrating strong communication and problem‑solving skills.
• Proven ability to anticipate risks, plan production solutions and collaborate with senior leadership.

Required skills

• Apache Spark, Spark UI, DAGs, event logs
• SQL, Delta Lake, Iceberg
• Python, Java, Scala
• Data Lakes, Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery
• AWS, Azure, GCP
• CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, alerting
• Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Generative AI