Senior Designated Support Engineer – Apache Spark

About the role

Databricks is looking for a Senior Designated Support Engineer with deep expertise in Apache Spark to provide high‑touch, proactive support for strategic customers. The role combines technical problem solving, customer engagement, and project management to ensure swift resolution of critical issues.

Key responsibilities

• Manage large strategic accounts and deliver a high‑touch support experience.
• Deep‑dive into complex Apache Spark and data‑engineering issues, analyzing Spark UI, thread dumps, and driver/executor logs to resolve performance bottlenecks.
• Advise customers on best practices for ETL/ELT pipelines, data modeling, and leveraging the Databricks Lakehouse architecture (Delta Lake/Iceberg).
• Project‑manage open support cases to accelerate ticket closure and coordinate with Engineering, Product, and Account teams.
• Engage directly on business‑impacting situations, ensuring functional recovery and driving customer self‑sufficiency.

Required profile

• Minimum 3 years of experience in data engineering, building and maintaining large‑scale data pipelines.
• At least 3 years developing Python, Java, or Scala applications.
• Deep architectural knowledge of Apache Spark internals (drivers, executors, memory management, DAGs, Catalyst, Tungsten).
• Proven track record troubleshooting complex Spark issues such as data skew, OOM errors, serialization problems, and slow broadcast joins.
• Strong project‑management skills and ability to coordinate multiple work streams.
• Excellent executive presence and communication skills for interacting with senior leadership and non‑technical stakeholders.

Required skills

• Apache Spark
• Python
• Java
• Scala
• Delta Lake
• Iceberg
• ETL/ELT pipeline development
• Data Engineering concepts