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Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi. (Databricks Photo)
Databricks is the talk of the tech world this week as the data and AI company raises $10 billion at a mind-blowing $62 billion valuation, one of the largest venture capital deals ever.
The massive funding round for the 11-year-old San Francisco-based “data intelligence platform” will be used to accelerate its AI efforts, with co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi telling Fortune this week that he’s in a “war for AI talent right now” against the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and others.
And if you’re an entrepreneur in the AI talent wars, Seattle is an important outpost.
Databricks plans to continue bolstering its presence at two offices in the Seattle area, a spokesperson told GeekWire on Wednesday.
The fast-growing company — which helps more than 60% of the Fortune 500 manage and analyze large volumes of data — employs nearly 400 people at an R&D facility in Seattle, just south of downtown, and another location in Bellevue.
That’s a huge uptick from 52 people in 2021, when GeekWire first wrote about the company’s expansion in the region.
Based on a quick search of the Databricks’ jobs page, there’s plenty of growth ahead. The company lists more than two dozen open engineering positions in Seattle and Bellevue, as well as 16 product-oriented roles and a handful of finance and administration positions.
“We’re radically simplifying the entire data lifecycle, from ingestion to generative AI and everything in-between,” one job description reads for a software engineer. “We’re doing it cross-cloud with a unified platform, currently serving over 10k customers, processing exabytes of data/day on 15+ million VMs, and growing exponentially.”
The company’s chief security officer, Fermín Serna, is based in the Seattle area, and a number of the open roles in the area have a security bent. He was previously SVP and CIO at Citrix, and worked in security engineering at Google.
Databricks, which competes with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Snowflake and others, employs 7,000 people worldwide.
It is one of more than 100 companies that have satellite engineering offices in the Seattle area, which ranked No. 2 on CBRE’s latest list of top tech hubs in the U.S. and Canada.
OpenAI, Pinterest, and Brex recently opened new offices in the region.
The Bay Area and Seattle are home to a majority of the country’s AI engineers, according to a report from San Francisco venture capital firm SignalFire.
