Tech Lead Manager - Lakebase

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 optimised 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 founding leaders building out both the Lakebase product and our London presence.

This is a Tech Lead Manager role: a hands-on technical leader who guides a small team of around five engineers while staying deep in the engineering work. You'll spend the majority of your time hands-on — driving architecture and design, solving the hardest problems in your team's projects, aligning with partner teams on dependencies, and writing code — and the rest leading and growing the engineers around you, who will report directly to you.

It's role for a strong senior engineer who wants to lead a team and take on people management without stepping away from the technical work.

The team you will lead (one of):

• Lakebase Platform Reliability (LPR) — Constantly evolve Lakebase reliability: cross-functional infrastructure, observability, SLI/SLO definition and measurement, and higher operational efficiency without humans-in-the-loop, for both internal and customer-facing systems, by building AI-powered automation and services.
• Lakebase Proxy — Build the heart of the Lakebase data path, the network edge that every customer touches. The proxy handles all client connections and transfers every byte of query traffic, serving every data protocol:
  Postgres, HTTP, Web Sockets, and the Data API. We route and manage large volumes of concurrent connections, solving load balancing, authentication, and data access at high throughput, with a focus on performance, observability, and reliability.
• Lakebase Storage — Drive continuous delivery within a team of experts in storage technology, distributed systems, and Rust. We manage the development and rollout of storage services that host millions of customer databases across dozens of regions, partnering with peer engineering teams across Databricks to co-evolve Lakebase services with our global infrastructure, and leading operational excellence in the 24/7 operation of our system.

The impact you will have:

• Lead a small team of 5-6 engineers, owning execution and on-time, high-quality delivery.
• Stay hands-on: 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.
• Grow the engineers on your team with clear feedback and career development.
• Align with partner teams on dependencies and unblock cross-cutting projects across the Lakebase stack.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to shape and deliver a long-term roadmap.

What we look for:

• 5+ years of engineering experience, including time as a tech lead or senior engineer, driving projects end-to-end.
• Strong hands-on technical depth: you still design systems and write code, and can go deep on architecture for large-scale distributed services.
• Experience with large-scale distributed services and the processes around testing, monitoring, and SLAs.
• People management, or at least tech lead experience, is a must — you're ready to take on direct reports and lead them.
• Ability to align multiple stakeholders on competing priorities.
• Able to balance short-term delivery against long-term stability.
• BS (or higher) in Computer Science, or a…