Senior Manager Compensation R&D
Databricks · United States
GAQ127R143 Databricks is looking for a strategic compensation leader who likes to build. You'll be a trusted partner to founders and senior leaders in our Engineering organization. Together you'll create compensation solutions that help us attract, retain and motivate world-class engineering and technical talent, and you'll use AI to build the tools that make those solutions scale. This role reports to the Director of Compensation. At Databricks, compensation is more than a number. It's how we show that every employee is an owner and part of our success. We're looking for someone with a strong foundation and a track record of doing exactly that. What it takes to thrive Databricks is a deeply technical, fast-moving company, and our Engineering organization builds the platform everything else runs on. You'll partner with highly technical, data-driven leaders who expect rigorous analysis, clear points of view and collaborative problem-solving. Priorities can change quickly, and you'll often run several important initiatives at once. We set high standards for this role to support our fast-paced growth. Successful team members in this environment tend to: Build trust through analytical rigor. You present well-reasoned models and effectively articulate complex analysis to engineering leaders who will test your assumptions. Navigate fast-paced priorities with resilience. You maintain focus, sound judgment, and positivity when balancing competing deadlines and feedback. Offer constructive perspectives. You confidently partner with senior stakeholders to propose data-backed alternative solutions and drive alignment to finalize decisions. Embrace feedback as a growth tool. You extract actionable insights from feedback and respond with clarity and openness. Create order from ambiguity. When there's no playbook, you build one, and you're comfortable acting on 80% of the information. If you are excited by high standards, technical depth, and collaborative strategic discussions, you will find this work deeply rewarding. The impact you will have This is a hands-on, high-impact role. Expected time on each area: Engineering compensation solutions and strategic advice (40%) Work directly with Engineering leaders to diagnose talent challenges, such as competition for AI/ML and infrastructure talent, hard-to-fill specialist roles, rapid team scaling, acquisitions and reorganizations. Then design attraction and retention solutions that solve them. Turn vague or urgent requests into clear options with explicit tradeoffs, and help leaders reach a decision. Serve as the main compensation advisor on strategic technical hires (senior ICs, distinguished engineers, research leaders and engineering executives) and on high-stakes retention cases. Advise on technical leveling, including IC and management career paths and how compensation should differ across them. AI-enabled lifecycle compensation (30%) Run merit, refresh equity and promotion cycles end to end for global R&D teams. Design and build AI tools and workflows that reduce manual work and improve decisions. Examples include offer modeling, retention-risk analysis, cycle quality checks, and self-serve insights for leaders. Spot what's repetitive or error-prone in today's processes and automate it. Enterprise compensation frameworks (30%) Help scale Databricks' global compensation structure, including market pricing models, pay-for-performance design, equity strategy and technical job architecture. Build frameworks that solve today's problems and anticipate the ones coming as we grow, including emerging skill premiums such as AI/ML. What we look for Quantitative and technical skill is the foundation of this role. Everything else we look for builds on it. 1. Quantitative and technical foundation (required) Expert-level analytical modeling. You build compensation models from scratch, including cost-of-program scenarios, pay-positioning analysis, at