Director, Engineering Governance- Mountain View, CA Mountain View, California

Mountain View, California

Director of Engineering, Governance Foundation – Databricks

Databricks is the Lakehouse company. More than 7,000 organizations worldwide use the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify data, analytics, and AI. Founded by the creators of Apache Spark, Delta Lake and MLflow, Databricks is dedicated to helping data teams solve the world’s toughest problems.

We are seeking a highly technical and influential Director of Engineering to define how security, privacy, and responsible data practices are built into the core of Databricks’ products and infrastructure. This role is not simply about running programs—it is about designing and scaling the engineering platforms, guardrails, and operating models that make secure and compliant product development the default across a rapidly growing, multi‑cloud ecosystem.

• Security & Privacy Governance Architecture
  • Define the company‑wide strategy for embedding security, privacy and responsible data use across engineering workflows and platform components.
  • Build scalable governance frameworks that help engineering teams design secure systems from the start.
• Incident Learning & Prevention
  • Establish and lead a Security & Privacy Postmortem Review process that drives learning, accountability, and long‑term resilience.
  • Ensure insights from incidents translate into systemic improvements across tools, infrastructure and engineering culture.
• Security Champions & Distributed Expertise
  • Rebuild and scale a Security Champions Network that brings security and governance expertise directly into product and infrastructure teams.
  • Create centralized enablement, tooling and shared learning systems that allow thousands of engineers to integrate security seamlessly.
• Data Governance for Products & AI
  • Lead efforts to ensure responsible data use across AI/ML systems, SaaS environments and internal work spaces.
  • Define and enforce policies that uphold privacy, integrity, auditability, and proper data lifecycle management.
• Developer‑Centric Security Enablement
  • Transform security into a key enabler for engineering velocity.
  • Deliver automation, self‑service tools and intelligent guardrails that reduce developer friction while increasing safety and compliance.
  • Build just‑in‑time (JIT) security education and systems that proactively surface risky behaviour before it becomes an incident.
• Security Maturity & Customer Trust
  • Elevate Databricks’ security posture to exceed DB50 customer expectations in areas such as audit logging, controlled access workflows, secure asset import/export and behaviour monitoring & lineage.
  • Partner with security, IT and compliance teams to ensure readiness for the most demanding enterprise and regulated environments.

• Lead a team of 4–5 senior Security SMEs.
• Dotted‑line influence over embedded security champions across multiple engineering organisations.
• Significant cross‑functional reach with product, platform and security leadership.

• Build durable foundations that make our products secure‑by‑default.
• Influence engineering practices across thousands of developers.
• Lead governance strategy at a company experiencing explosive growth.
• Strengthen Databricks’ trust with our largest, most security‑conscious customers.
• Help define what responsible AI and secure cloud development look like at global scale.

• 10+ years of experience in large‑scale software engineering, with several years leading engineering managers and senior ICs.
• Strong technical grounding in backend systems, distributed systems, identity/security or enterprise cloud platforms.
• Experience defining governance, security or enterprise‑grade platform capabilities.
• Background as a senior IC (e.g., Staff/Principal Engineer) at some point.
• Proven success hiring, developing and retaining senior engineering talent.

• Experience building cloud‑agnostic or multi‑cloud services.
• Background in enterprise features such as access control, policy engines, compliance or identity systems.
• Experience leading organisations through scaling phases in high‑growth environments.

Local Pay Range: $255,900 —…