Staff Databricks Platform Engineer

What You Need To Know

Shape a remarkable future with us. Build a career working for an industry leader that truly invests in their people - and equips them with leading technology, continuous learning, and the ability to bring their best selves to work. As North America's largest total beverage distributor, Southern Glazer’s isn't just one of Forbes’ Top Private Companies; it's a family-owned business with deep roots dating back to 1933.

Southern Glazer’s is proud of its well-earned positive reputation, continually achieving accolades for our outstanding workplace culture. We take pride in creating a culture where our people are valued, supported, and provided opportunities for growth and belonging.

As a full-time employee, you can choose from a wide-ranging menu of our Top Shelf Benefits, including comprehensive medical and prescription drug coverage, dental and vision plans, tax-saving Flexible Spending Accounts, disability coverage, life insurance plans, and a 401(k) plan. We also offer tuition assistance, a wellness program, parental leave, vacation accrual, paid sick leave, and more.

By joining Southern Glazer’s, you would be part of a team that values excellence, innovation, and community. This is more than just a job - it's an opportunity to build the future of beverage distribution and grow with a company that truly cares about its people.

Overview

The Staff Databricks Platform Engineer owns the engineering of Southern Glazer's Databricks lakehouse as a product: the workspaces, governance model, compute fabric, and automation that every data engineering, analytics, and AI/ML team at SGWS builds on. This is a platform role, not a pipeline role - success is measured by the reliability, security, cost efficiency, and developer velocity of the platform itself, rather than by the number of datasets delivered.

The role sets the standards other engineers follow: how workspaces and catalogs are structured, how entitlements are granted and audited, how workloads are deployed and promoted, and how compute spend is controlled. It operates with significant autonomy, partners directly with Enterprise Architecture, Security, and Cloud Infrastructure, and mentors engineers across the Data & AI Platforms organization.

Primary Responsibilities

• Own the design and operation of the Databricks platform across environments - workspace topology, account-level configuration, metastore design, and workspace-to-cloud networking.
• Design and enforce the Unity Catalog governance model: catalog and schema hierarchy, group-based entitlements, service principal patterns, row- and column-level security, dynamic views, and audit logging.
• Build platform automation as code - Terraform and the Databricks provider, asset bundles, and CI/CD pipelines that provision workspaces, clusters, policies, jobs, and permissions without manual intervention.
• Define and maintain cluster policies, instance pools, serverless configuration, and SQL warehouse sizing standards that balance performance against cost.
• Own Databricks FinOps: attribute consumption by team and workload through tagging and system tables, set budgets and alerts, identify optimization targets, and drive spend reductions without degrading SLAs.
• Engineer secure connectivity and data protection - private endpoints, customer-managed keys, secret scopes, credential passthrough, and secure integration with AWS, Azure, and on-prem sources.
• Design and operate Delta Sharing and cross-workspace data access patterns for internal consumers and external partners.
• Build platform observability: monitoring of job reliability, cluster health, query performance, and system table analytics, with alerting routed to the right owners.
• Establish the golden paths for platform consumers - reference architectures, reusable frameworks, onboarding automation, and paved-road patterns for ingestion, transformation, and ML workloads.
• Lead platform upgrades and runtime migrations, including impact assessment, regression testing, and coordinated rollout across consuming teams.
• Serve as the escalation point for complex platform incidents; lead root cause analysis and drive permanent corrective action.
• Review designs and code from engineers across teams, and mentor junior and mid-level engineers on lakehouse, governance, and automation practices.
• Partner with Databricks account and support teams on roadmap alignment, feature adoption, contract consumption, and escalations.
• Maintain platform documentation, standards, and runbooks, and communicate platform changes, capabilities, and risks to technical teams and leadership.

Additional Primary Responsibilities

• Ensure the collected data is within required quality standards.
• Troubleshoot data analytic tools, systems, and software.
• Identify and resolve production and/or development problems that relate to the use of the database management systems.
• Resolve moderately complex conflicts between models and ensure data model consistency across SGWS (e.g., entity names, relationships, and definitions).
• Develop and maintain a query library to support data requests.
• Document and review models, solutions, and implementations (e.g., Data Mapping, Technical Specifications, Production Support, Data Dictionaries, Test Cases, etc.).
• Create custom software components and analytics applications.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and work experience.
• Typically 8+ years in data engineering, platform engineering, or cloud infrastructure, including 3+ years hands-on with Databricks in a production enterprise environment.
• Demonstrated ownership of a shared data platform used by multiple engineering or analytics teams - not solely project-based pipeline delivery.
• Deep working knowledge of Unity Catalog, Delta Lake internals, Apache Spark performance tuning, and Databricks Workflows.
• Strong Python and SQL, with production experience in infrastructure as code (Terraform preferred) and CI/CD automation.
• Hands-on cloud experience in AWS or Azure covering identity, networking, storage, and key management.
• Proven experience managing platform cost and capacity at enterprise scale.
• Strong verbal, written, and facilitation skills, with the ability to communicate technical trade-offs to engineering teams, business stakeholders, and executive leadership.
• Strong experience in DevOps and Agile technology environments.
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional technical initiatives and mentor other engineers.

Physical Demands

• Physical demands include a considerable amount of time sitting and typing/keyboarding, using a computer (e.g., keyboard, mouse, and monitor), or adding machine
• Physical demands with activity or condition may include walking, bending, reaching, standing, squatting, and stooping
• May require occasional lifting/lowering, pushing, carrying, or pulling up to 20lbs

EEO Statement

Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits, an Affirmative Action/EEO employer, prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type and provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training. SGWS complies with all federal, state and local laws concerning consideration of a qualified applicant's arrest and/or criminal conviction records. Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits provides competitive compensation based on estimated performance level consistent with the past relevant experience, knowledge, skills, abilities and education of employees. Unless otherwise expressly stated, any pay ranges posted here are estimates from outside of Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits and do not reflect Southern Glazer's pay bands or ranges.

If you have any questions or concerns about whether this posting complies/adheres with local pay transparency requirements, please contact the SGWS talent acquisition team at [email protected]