Data Platform Engineer, Senior Staff

Company:
Qualcomm Incorporated


Job Area:
Information Technology Group, Information Technology Group > IT Data Engineer

General

Summary:



We are hiring a Data Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate a modern, data platform with Databricks Lakehouse as a core foundation.

This role is ideal for a senior engineer who excels in system design, platform innovation, and hands-on execution. You will help design, implement and improve reliability of the data platform, influence architectural direction, and mentor engineers while working closely with data scientists, analysts, and application teams.

This is a hands-on, high-impact role with strong ownership across architecture, implementation, reliability, security, and cost optimization.

This role requires full-time onsite work (5 days per week) in either San Diego, CA or Boulder, CO.


** This position is not eligible for Qualcomm immigration sponsorship.**

Minimum Qualifications:
7+ years of IT-related work experience with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems or a related field.
OR
9+ years of IT-related work experience without a Bachelor's degree.
5+ years of work experience with programming (e.g., Java, Python).
3+ years of work experience with SQL or No

SQL Databases.
3+ years of work experience with Data Structures and algorithms.

What You'll Do

• Design and build scalable, distributed data platform systems
• Own Databricks workspace architecture, governance, and lifecycle management
• Implement infrastructure as code using Terraform/Terramate
• Build and support end-to-end data pipelines, from ingestion to analytics and ML
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure, data pipelines, notebooks, SQL, and ML artifacts
• Operate and optimize Amazon EKS clusters supporting data workloads
• Define and monitor SLIs/SLOs for platform reliability and data quality
• Drive innovation and continuous improvement across platform architecture and tooling
• Lead incident response, on-call rotations, and blameless post-mortems
• Implement strong security, compliance, and governance controls
• Mentor engineers and influence platform standards and best practices

Must-Have Qualifications

System Design & Innovation

• Proven experience designing complex, distributed data systems end-to-end
• Strong system design skills across cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, storage, governance, and observability
• Ability to evaluate and communicate architectural trade-offs (scalability, reliability, cost, security, operability)
• Demonstrated innovation mindset, such as:
  • Modernizing or simplifying legacy data platforms
  • Introducing new architectural patterns or platform capabilities
  • Improving reliability, performance, or developer experience through design

Cloud & Data Platform Expertise

• 8+ years building and operating large-scale cloud platforms
• 5+ years in Data Platform, Dev Ops, SRE, or Data Ops roles
• Expert-level experience with AWS, including networking, IAM, security, and multi-account environments
• Strong hands-on experience with Databricks Lakehouse Platform, including:
  • Unity Catalog
  • Delta Lake
  • MLflow
• Experience owning Databricks workspace architecture and governance

Infrastructure, Automation & Reliability

• Deep experience with Terraform/Terramate (or similar IaC tools)
• Proven experience building CI/CD pipelines (Git Hub Actions, Jenkins)
• Advanced Python and Bash scripting skills
• Hands-on experience managing Amazon EKS clusters and Helm deployments
• Experience defining and operating SLIs/SLOs for platform reliability and data quality

Security & Leadership

• Strong understanding of cloud security best practices
• Experience supporting SOX, GDPR, or regulated environments
• AWS Certified Dev Ops Engineer - Professional (or equivalent experience)
• Ability to work independently and mentor team members
• Strong communication skills to explain complex system designs to technical and non-technical stakeholders

Nice-to-Have

• Experience with Acceldata, Open Telemetry, or data observability tools
• Experience with Fivetran Hybrid / HVR or enterprise ingestion tools
• Experience working with Hashicorp vault or similar secret management tools
• Policy-as-code experience using OPA
• Experience working with static Code analysis…