Data Platform Engineer, Senior Staff

Data Platform Engineer

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 NoSQL 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, DevOps, SRE, or DataOps 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 (GitHub 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 DevOps 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, OpenTelemetry, 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 tool like Sonar
• Experience with data lineage or metadata management tools
• Databricks serverless compute optimization and cost management
• Experience driving platform strategy across multiple teams distributed globally

Qualcomm is an equal opportunity employer. If you are an individual with a disability and need an accommodation during the application/hiring process, rest assured that Qualcomm is committed to providing an accessible process. You may e-mail View email address on click.appcast.io or call Qualcomm's toll-free number found here. Upon request, Qualcomm will provide reasonable accommodations to support individuals with disabilities to be able to participate in the hiring process. Qualcomm is also committed to making our workplace accessible for individuals with disabilities.

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Pay range and Other Compensation & Benefits: $158,400.00 - $237,600.00

The above pay scale reflects the broad, minimum to maximum, pay scale for this job code for the location for which it has been posted. Even more importantly, please note that salary is only one component of total compensation at Qualcomm. We also offer a competitive annual discretionary bonus program and opportunity for annual RSU grants (employees on sales-incentive plans are not eligible for our annual bonus). In addition, our highly competitive benefits package is designed to support your success at work, at home, and at play. Your recruiter will be happy to discuss all that Qualcomm has to offer – and you can review more details about our US benefits at this link.