P-1209
MissionAt Databricks, our mission is to help data teams solve the world’s toughest problems — from climate change to healthcare to cybersecurity — with the power of data and AI. As our platform scales globally, optimizing infrastructure efficiency, reliability, and cost is critical to our ability to innovate and grow.
The Director, Cost and Capacity Programs will lead the company’s cross-functional strategy and execution to ensure Databricks operates with predictable cost efficiency and elastic capacity across cloud providers, products, and global regions. You will build the programs, infrastructure, rhythms, and insights that empower teams to make data-driven trade-offs between performance, reliability, and cost.
The Impact You Will Have- Lead and scale programs focused on cost, capacity, and efficiency across Databricks infrastructure and product lines.
- Drive strategy and execution for multi-cloud infrastructure optimization, provisioning guardrails, utilization forecasting, and spend governance.
- Partner deeply with Infrastructure Engineering, Finance, and Product to align capacity plans, cost goals, and business growth objectives.
- Establish a clear operating rhythm - monthly/quarterly reviews, forecasts, and dashboards to provide transparency and accountability at every level.
- Develop metrics and insights that quantify ROI, utilization, and efficiency, enabling leadership to make informed investment decisions.
- Build and scale cross-functional initiatives such as rightsizing, multi-cloud optimization, reserved capacity planning, and workload placement.
- Implement FinOps best practices to embed cost awareness and accountability into engineering workflows, tooling, and culture.
- Influence cloud vendor negotiations and architecture choices, ensuring Databricks achieves the optimal balance between cost, reliability, and performance.
- Mentor a high-performing team of technical program managers and analysts driving impact across engineering, product, and operations.
Basic Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical discipline (or equivalent experience).
- 12+ years of experience in program management, infrastructure operations, or engineering leadership.
- Proven track record leading large-scale cost, capacity, or cloud optimization initiatives in high-growth SaaS or platform environments.
- Deep understanding of cloud cost models (AWS, Azure, GCP), infrastructure provisioning, and performance optimization.
- Strong financial acumen and experience partnering closely with Finance, FP&A, and Ops teams.
- Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills — able to influence across engineering, product, and executive teams.
- Analytical and strategic thinker who can distill complex trade-offs into clear recommendations and metrics.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building or leading FinOps or CostOps functions in large-scale distributed systems environments.
- Familiarity with infrastructure forecasting, resource modeling, and capacity management tooling.
- Deep understanding of Kubernetes, data platforms, or compute/storage scaling patterns.
- Experience in a hyperscale, multi-cloud, or data infrastructure company.
- Strong people leadership and mentorship experience.
Pay Range Transparency
Databricks is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range(s) for this role is listed below and represents the expected salary range for non-commissionable roles or on-target earnings for commissionable roles. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to job-related skills, depth of experience, relevant certifications and training, and specific work location. Based on the factors above, Databricks anticipates utilizing the full width of the range. The total compensation package for this position may also include eligibility for annual performance bonus, equity, and the benefits listed above. For more information regarding which range your location is in visit our page here.
About Databricks
Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 10,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, Grammarly, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify and democratize data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Benefits
At Databricks, we strive to provide comprehensive benefits and perks that meet the needs of all of our employees. For specific details on the benefits offered in your region, please visit https://www.mybenefitsnow.com/databricks.
Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
At Databricks, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can excel. We take great care to ensure that our hiring practices are inclusive and meet equal employment opportunity standards. Individuals looking for employment at Databricks are considered without regard to age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other protected characteristics.
Compliance
If access to export-controlled technology or source code is required for performance of job duties, it is within Employer's discretion whether to apply for a U.S. government license for such positions, and Employer may decline to proceed with an applicant on this basis alone.
Top Skills
What We Do
As the leader in Unified Data Analytics, Databricks helps organizations make all their data ready for analytics, empower data science and data-driven decisions across the organization, and rapidly adopt machine learning to outpace the competition. By providing data teams with the ability to process massive amounts of data in the Cloud and power AI with that data, Databricks helps organizations innovate faster and tackle challenges like treating chronic disease through faster drug discovery, improving energy efficiency, and protecting financial markets.
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