Inside Databricks: AI, Org Design & Engineering at Scale | VP of Engineering Sam Shah
When Sam Shah joined Databricks, there were fewer than 200 engineers. Four years later, there are more than 2,000. As VP of Engineering, he’s led through hypergrowth, culture change, and the mainstream adoption of AI — all from inside one of the most influential data companies in the world.
In our conversation, Sam shared how he thinks about scaling culture, leading through rapid change, and what separates a 10× engineer from a 100× one.
If you’d been there, here’s what you’d still be thinking about:
“The best engineers are the laziest.” Not an insult, but a compliment! “The best engineers are the laziest engineers—they just don’t want to do things themselves, so they get the machines to do it,” he says. He told the story of an engineer who wrote agents that read docs, build, and deploy automatically. The goal isn’t to be drinking a mai tai on the beach; it’s to be freeing up time for bigger, higher-level strategic work. And they’re able to push the frontier, automate relentlessly, and share what they learn … so adoption spreads.
Culture is essential in hypergrowth: When you double headcount every year like Databricks does, culture doesn’t scale automatically — so you have to be intentional about how you build and preserve culture. Sam maps where culture “lives,” embeds those culture carriers into every new team, and puts them on interview loops with veto power. And then actually follows through; if the culture interview does’t pass, the person doesn’t get hired. To put it plainly: “The team you build is the company you build.” At Databricks, they interview for belief, teamwork, hunger and mission, customer obsession, and solution orientation.
From 10x to 100x: There’s this notion that a rising tide carries all ships with AI adoption, that every engineer will get a little bit (to a lot) better. But that’s not what Sam sees in his org. “We haven’t seen a small change,” he says. “We’ve seen some people become 100× because they figured out how to adopt AI and really supercharge it.” People who were 10xers are becoming 100Xers. The challenge (and opportunity) that Sam has is empowering those people to help raise everyone else up.
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