Sr. Manager, Capability Engineering & AI Adoption — APJ
- Your natural ability to inspire and coach people makes you excellent at developing an elite regional team of architects.
- You shine in building consensus and navigating high-stakes executive relationships across different cultures.
- Your focus on collaboration helps orchestrate between account teams, field leadership, and customers effectively.
- The technical depth required in data engineering and AI goes beyond your usual people-centered expertise.
- The hands-on prototyping and coding demands could pull you away from the interpersonal work you enjoy most.
Databricks is experiencing tremendous growth as enterprise organizations transition from evaluating AI to rapidly deploying production-grade AI systems. This role exists to redefine how we enable our largest customers to move faster, activate their data workforces, and convert platform investments into measurable business outcomes.
As the Senior Manager of Capability Engineering & AI Adoption for APJ, you will lead a regional team of deeply Customer Enablement Architects who act as the ultimate trusted advisors and builder-enablement partners for Databricks’ most complex customers. You will operate at the intersection of technical depth and business strategy—translating advanced product roadmaps into just-in-time, personalized capability programs that meet customers exactly where they are in their modernization and AI adoption journeys. This position will be reporting to Director, Capability Engineering APJ.
The Impact You Will Have
- People Leadership: Lead, coach, and develop an elite regional team of Customer Enablement Architects across APJ, setting a high standard for technical depth, customer impact, and creative problem-solving.
- Capability Engineering at Scale: Redesign enterprise enablement workflows, moving away from legacy episodic models to continuous, contextual, and hyper-personalized capability building aligned with customers' modernization curves.
- AI Adoption & MAU Activation: Partner directly with account teams and field leadership to diagnose capability blockers and drive measurable increases in Monthly Active Users (MAU) across strategic enterprise accounts.
- Hands-on Builder Innovation: Cultivate a builder culture within the team to design and deploy custom enablement applications, tools, and prototypes (e.g., via Databricks Apps, Genie, or agentic frameworks) when standard curricula fall short.
- Executive & Stakeholder Alignment: Conduct deep discovery sessions with enterprise technical leaders and C-suite executives, aligning strategic capability roadmaps with the customer's high-level AI transformation goals.
- Global Operational Integrity: Serve as the regional voice into global curriculum and certification teams to prioritize APJ market needs and skill gaps, while maintaining strict operational rigor with training logistics teams.
- Strategic Regional Presence: Undertake significant regional travel across APJ to engage directly with strategic enterprise accounts on-site, lead high-stakes executive alignment sessions, and provide hands-on leadership to a geographically dispersed team.
What We Look For
- Technical Depth: Deep foundational understanding of lakehouse architecture, data engineering/ETL pipelines, data governance, and generative AI/agentic workflows to earn immediate respect from customer data teams.
- Hands-on Builder Mindset: A non-negotiable track record of personally designing, building, and deploying working prototypes, automation tools, or technical apps.
- Customer-Facing Solutioning: Prior experience in a solutions architect, customer success engineering, technical pre-sales, or advanced delivery role, with a proven ability to confidently navigate ambiguity and discover core user friction points.
- Enablement Reinvention: Passion for moving beyond legacy classroom-style or completion-centric learning models into just-in-time, contextual capability building embedded directly in user workflows.
- Commercial & Business Insight: Ability to connect technical skill outcomes to core P&L levers, influence renewals/expansions, and collaborate effectively with sales on strategic account planning.
- APJ Fluency & Mobility (Required): Lived experience operating across APJ markets (ANZ, SEA, Japan, India, Korea). Ability and willingness to travel extensively (frequent regional travel expected) to meet customers and support team members across different geographies. You possess the resilience and cultural adaptability required to remain highly effective while managing a demanding regional travel schedule.
- Leadership and Credibility: Prior experience leading and managing technical or customer-facing engineering teams, with a proven ability to mentor talent, hold a high bar, and build a cohesive team identity.
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 click here.
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.
Best personality fits for this role
Your natural leadership and drive to orchestrate teams toward a goal make you ideal for leading this regional team and scaling enablement.
Read the ENTJ career guide →Your strategic vision and comfort with big-picture planning align perfectly with designing customer AI adoption roadmaps.
Read the INTJ career guide →Your enthusiasm for reinventing systems matches the need to redesign enterprise enablement from episodic to continuous.
Read the ENTP career guide →