I’m thrilled to announce that Databricks R&D is coming to Vancouver. Starting today, we’re inviting the world-class engineers of this beautiful city to join us on our mission to democratize data + AI.
In 2016, I reached out to connect with Matei through his MIT email address as Spark was upending the data world, and was surprised to learn that he was leaving the prestigious faculty to spend more time on his start-up with a funny name. With admiration, I watched that company rapidly grow into a juggernaut, continuously inventing new technologies and paradigms that define the modern data + AI landscape in the process.
That’s why I was so excited to join Databricks through its acquisition of Datajoy a few years ago. In the years since, I’ve had the pleasure of leading a number of exciting efforts at Databricks, including our expansion into data warehousing with Databricks SQL, business intelligence with AI/BI, and Databricks One. I’ve also learned to deeply appreciate the magic of our not-so-secret formula to success: hire exceptional people and empower them to tackle audacious goals. This is something that many companies will pay lip service to, but something that Databricks truly lives out.
All of this is why I’m beyond excited to now lead the launch of our Vancouver Development Center. With Vancouver’s heritage as one of the birthplaces for analytics, the city has a deep pool of data and AI talent for Databricks to draw from. We envision Vancouver becoming a key hub for some of our most strategic efforts at Databricks. To start, we’re bringing the following initiatives to Vancouver:
- AI/BI: Since launching last summer, AI/BI has seen rapid adoption — 98.7% of our data warehousing customers are already using it. This is a unique opportunity to help define a new category at the intersection of generative AI, semantic modelling, and data visualization. From rich dashboarding and advanced visualizations to powerful talk-to-your-data solutions, the products we are building involve fun and exciting technical challenges across the entire stack.
- Petabyte-scale Real-time Analytics: Many customers now use Databricks to analyze petabyte-scale logs in real time. This creates new technical challenges in streaming ingestion, indexing, and low-latency search and querying. Our team is building the next generation of observability infrastructure, enabling threat detection, incident resolution, and operation automation faster than ever.
- Unity Catalog Business Semantics: Context is critical for AI. For enterprise data, that context must be governed and modeled. Unity Catalog Business Semantics is our solution to this foundational problem, allowing businesses to answer questions like “what is our churn rate?” consistently and accurately no matter what tool or AI they use. This team works at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, data modeling, governance, and AI enablement.
- Databricks Apps: Databricks Apps enable anyone to build and deploy secure data and AI applications. We recently GAed it at Data + AI Summit in June, and it’s one of the fastest-growing products at Databricks, already used by more than 2,500 customers who have created more than 20,000 apps. The application market is evolving daily, with vibe-coding democratizing app development. This is a technically complex space. The Apps team is one of the few teams that are exposed to low-level platform components (k8s, networking), owns fundamental tech (apps runtime and proxy), and is heavily investing in app builder AI agents.
To celebrate the launch, we’re hosting an exclusive networking event in Vancouver on Thursday, August 21. Attendees will have the chance to meet Reynold Xin, co-founder of Databricks, along with me and other members of the founding team at the Vancouver site. If you’re interested in attending, register here. (Please note that space is limited — registrations will be reviewed and confirmed individually.)
If you can’t make the event, you can still monitor our careers site for open roles (we’ll be posting more roles in the weeks and months to come) in Vancouver and learn more about how to get involved.
Come join us!
View our open roles and apply today!
