Product Finance Director, R&D Capital Allocation & Engineering Operations

(GAQ427R231)

About the role 

As Databricks scales at unprecedented velocity, how we invest our R&D capital—both human and compute—is critical to our scale. We are looking for a Product Finance leader to own R&D capital allocation and engineering operations. You will be a key finance partner to our senior Engineering and Product Operations leaders, with a mandate that spans product-level R&D ROI, global workforce and location strategy, and the rapidly evolving economics of AI-enabled software development.

The impact you will have

• Drive product-level ROI and R&D capital allocation
• Establish frameworks to measure product-level ROI across a fast-moving platform like Databricks where engineering velocity is extremely high.
• Operationalize ROI metrics so they directly inform product investment and resource allocation decisions.
• Define engineering economics in the AI era
• Partner with Engineering to model how AI developer tooling and internal token spend scale alongside headcount, quantifying the tradeoff between human capital and compute capital.
• Measure the end-to-end cost of AI-enabled engineering, including the second-order impact on cloud spend, and partner with Engineering to optimize investments.
• Shape global workforce and location strategy
• Drive multi-year headcount planning across global engineering hubs, balancing cost per hire, talent density, and university recruiting pipelines.
• Partner closely with Workplace and Facilities leadership to synchronize R&D hiring roadmaps with global real estate strategy and multi-year CapEx planning.
• Scale R&D finance operations and build the team
• Bring systems-level thinking to R&D finance operations, building scalable, automated workflows across headcount management, PO planning, monthly accruals, and SOX audit compliance.
• Dogfood the Databricks platform to modernize internal finance tooling and deliver self-serve operational visibility to engineering leaders.
• Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing team of finance professionals capable of operating seamlessly across strategic capital allocation and rigorous operational execution.

What we look for

• Required
• 10+ years of experience in Strategic/Product Finance or R&D FP&A.
• Deep experience managing large-scale R&D OpEx, headcount capacity modeling, and multi-site workforce planning within a high-growth enterprise software or cloud company.
• A proven track record of partnering directly with senior Engineering, Product Operations, and People/Workplace executives to drive capital allocation and operational rigor.
• Systems-level thinker with a demonstrated ability to re-engineer financial processes from scratch—spanning headcount tracking, procurement, close, and SOX controls—to support rapid scale.
• Experience building, leading, and developing high-output finance teams in fast-moving environments.
• Preferred
• Direct experience analyzing cloud dev/test infrastructure and AI tooling/token costs.
• Experience attributing shared engineering and platform R&D costs across a complex, multi-product portfolio to establish product-level profitability.
• Hands-on proficiency with SQL, Python, or notebook environments (especially Databricks) to automate reporting and self-serve insights from large operational datasets.