Engineering Site Lead

Role Overview

We're looking for a senior engineering leader to anchor and shape Starburst's engineering presence in India. This is not a role for someone who optimizes a predefined org — it's for a builder and a business partner. The Director will help define what India engineering looks like, establish the right capabilities at the right time, and drive outcomes that matter to the company and its customers.

Starburst operates across hubs in San Francisco, Boston, and Warsaw. The India site will work most closely with Starburst's engineering hub in Warsaw — making that relationship a critical axis for the role — while also staying well-connected with teams in San Francisco and Boston.

Key Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership & Execution

• Lead engineering efforts in India with a clear focus on outcomes — not headcount targets or activity metrics
• Drive high-impact work in areas such as benchmark and upgrade testing, integration support, and other initiatives that extend Starburst's core platform capabilities
• Partner with European and US counterparts to deliver on shared goals across time zones
• Uphold and evolve engineering standards, delivery practices, and technical culture across India-based work

Site & Org Building

• Define the shape of the India engineering org in collaboration with leadership — which capabilities to build, in what order, and how to grow sustainably
• Own the local engineering culture: hiring bar, onboarding, retention, and community presence
• Build Starburst's employer brand in India through industry engagement, meetups, and genuine presence in the local tech community

Business & Customer Partnership

• Engage directly with enterprise customers in India and the broader region — in technical discussions, pre-sales, and escalations
• Partner with Sales, Solutions Engineering, and Customer Success to translate customer needs into engineering priorities
• Act as an owner of business outcomes, not just a delivery manager — understand what success means commercially and connect engineering work to it

Cross-hub Collaboration

• Build a particularly strong working relationship with the Warsaw engineering hub — the team India will collaborate with most day-to-day — while maintaining strong ties with Boston and SF leadership
• Ensure India teams are deeply integrated into the broader org — not treated as a remote extension, but as a core part of how Starburst builds
• Surface opportunities, blockers, and org health signals proactively across the leadership team

What We're Looking For

Must-haves

• 12+ years of overall engineering experience, with at least 5 years in engineering leadership
• Proven track record of building engineering presence in India — ideally from an early, ambiguous stage
• A genuine builder and partner mentality: excited by defining structure, not just running one
• Hands-on background in distributed systems, data engineering, or adjacent domains (Python, Java, SQL, Spark — Trino/Presto a strong plus)
• Strong ability to hire, grow, and retain senior engineers in a competitive India market
• Experience engaging enterprise customers directly — comfortable representing engineering in commercial conversations
• Strong cross-timezone and cross-cultural collaboration skills, particularly with European engineering teams
• Open source community familiarity or engagement

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in the data/analytics space (data lakehouse, query engines, cloud infrastructure)
• Background at companies like Confluent, Databricks, Snowflake, Cloudera, or similar
• Prior experience working alongside or extending teams based in Poland or Central/Eastern Europe

What Good Looks Like

The leadership team is looking for someone who sees themselves as a builder and a partner — not a hiring machine. The right person:

• Owns business outcomes — understands what Starburst is trying to achieve commercially and engineers toward that, not toward a headcount plan
• Defines the work, doesn't just receive it — collaborates with leadership to identify where India engineering can have the highest impact and shapes priorities accordingly
• Earns trust across hubs — Warsaw, Boston, SF; builds relationships through presence, reliability, and quality of judgment, not org chart authority
• Moves with conviction in ambiguity — makes good decisions without a complete picture, communicates clearly about uncertainty, and adjusts quickly
• Leads through influence as much as management — as credible with a senior IC on a technical design as with a customer VP in a commercial discussion