Director of Engineering: Commercialization & Marketplace

Director of Engineering - Databricks Commercialization & Marketplace 

P-1630

About the role

Every product Databricks ships has to be priced, contracted, rated and billed before it can earn a dollar. The Money organization builds the systems that make this happen, at hyperscaler scale and across every major cloud. We built the world's only cross-cloud integrated rating engine in-house, and it now rates billions of dollars in revenue. Our next goal is bigger: a fully automated, zero-touch order-to-cash flow where the platform is the source of truth for accounts, contracts and subscriptions, and Month End Close needs little or no human intervention.

As Director of Engineering, you will lead the engineering organization that owns this commercial engine from start to finish. You will set the product and technology strategy for how Databricks makes money. You will be the engineering voice Finance, Product and GTM leaders turn to for strategic decisions. You will also build the leadership bench that lets the organization keep scaling.

Speed is critical. Databricks keeps inventing new ways to sell: commit and pay-as-you-go, marketplaces, conditional benefits, strategic partnerships and new clouds and regions. The commerce engine either makes each of these fast and safe to launch, or it becomes the bottleneck. You will make sure it is the former.

What you'll own

The org covers six commercial domains:

• Pricing configuration: SKUs, multipliers, price-change processes, deal desk and discounting
• Orders and contracts: from negotiated quote to order to signed customer contract
• Subscriptions: commit, pay-as-you-go and proof-of-concept subscriptions, plus how contracts are tied to payment methods
• Rating: applying each customer's negotiated price, discounts and conditional benefits to ingested usage to compute the bill
• Billing: commit drawdown, invoicing, Month End Close and related financial processes
• Marketplace: third-party data and solutions, available seamlessly to Databricks customers

The impact you'll have

• Set and communicate the vision. Write the multi-year product and technology strategy for the commerce engine, toward a zero-touch order-to-cash flow and a next-generation billing architecture. Present it clearly to executives, Finance and Product leaders, so that strategy and architecture decisions come to you by default.
• Own business outcomes across orgs, not just your team's part. Revenue-critical programs routinely span 100+ people across Finance, Product, IT, Accounts and GTM. You will own the full outcome: dependency plans with clear owners, timelines, quality bars and escalation triggers, raised early in leadership forums so cross-org risks don't become executive surprises.
• Make commercialization a platform capability. Build reusable building blocks (credits, commits, conditional benefits, marketplace and partner billing) so that new pricing models and routes to market ship in weeks, not quarters.
• Treat foundations as seriously as features. Hold reliability, correctness, SOX and compliance readiness, security, cost visibility and operational load to the same standard as product launches. Billing errors should be structurally impossible, operational work should grow more slowly than revenue, and postmortems should actually lead to change.
• Partner deeply with Business & Finance. Turn accounting, close and compliance requirements into engineering design. Keep improving the Month End Close timeline and audit readiness, and earn the trust of Technical Accounting, Revenue Ops and Strategy & Execution leaders.
• Build a team of leaders. Grow the organization from one with a large group of direct-report engineers to one led by strong engineering managers and tech-lead managers, with clear subteams, domain boundaries and named owners. Coach managers to be great people leaders, give specific feedback and career plans, and recognize high-performing teams publicly.
• Hire like a founder. Act as the hiring owner for the Money Bellevue site. Source and close senior engineering and management talent, put the company first when placing hires across Money teams, and help raise the Databricks engineering hiring bar.

What we're looking for

• 12+ years in software engineering, including 6+ years leading engineering organizations and managing managers, ideally in billing, payments, commerce, fintech or other systems where errors directly cost revenue or create regulatory exposure
• A track record of delivering large, revenue-critical, cross-functional programs (for example, replacing a billing or rating system, migrating a source of truth, or automating order-to-cash) on time and with high quality
• Technical depth in distributed systems and large-scale data pipelines. You can discuss correctness, idempotency, reconciliation and data lineage with tech leads, and you know when to coach and when to decide.
• Fluency in order-to-cash and finance concepts: pricing and discounting, contracts, revenue recognition, invoicing, month-end close, SOX controls. You have earned trust as a partner to Finance and Accounting leaders.
• Strong product judgment: you can spot gaps in the commercial platform, shape requirements with Product, and make build-versus-buy decisions that pay off over time
• Clear, confident communication of strategy to executives, plus the ability to influence peers in Product, Finance, IT and GTM without direct authority
• Experience scaling an organization quickly while keeping a high hiring bar, developing strong leaders and engineers, and keeping them engaged on internal platform work
• BS in Computer Science or a related field; MS preferred. Experience with Kafka, Apache Spark, Delta Lake or cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) is a plus.

Why this role

You will run the engine behind the revenue of one of the fastest-growing data and AI companies in the world. The problems involve hard distributed-systems correctness at scale, high financial and compliance stakes, and a direct, visible link to company growth. You'll lead an established, high-trust team with a strong delivery record and help shape what the next generation of the commerce engine looks like.

Local Pay Range 249000 - 350000 USD