Over the previous three months, I had the chance to work as a Product Administration Intern on the Ingestion staff at Databricks. Throughout this time, I labored on large-scale, deeply technical initiatives that enhanced my understanding of the knowledge lakehouse structure. I additionally gained a radical understanding of how improvements like LakeFlow Join, Auto Loader, and COPY INTO effectively pull in knowledge from an intensive array of information codecs and sources. This expertise has been transformative for my development as a product supervisor, with Databricks’ cultural rules elevating my means to establish buyer wants, craft impactful options, and ship them efficiently to market.
The Databricks Ingestion Staff
Knowledge ingestion is usually the gateway to the Knowledge Intelligence Platform. It focuses on bringing in knowledge merely and effectively, such that it’s unified with different Databricks instruments like Unity Catalog and Workflows. On this approach, the info is made out there for evaluation, machine studying, and lots of different downstream functions.
Defining the issue
Given the potential affect of our work on almost all clients utilizing the Databricks platform, I used to be pushed to ship high-quality outcomes. I started by specializing in Databricks’ core cultural precept of buyer obsession. I had the prospect to fulfill with and study from almost 30 clients—discussing their workloads, Jobs To Be Accomplished (JTBD), and requests for the platform. By these hypothesis-driven discussions, I gained perception into the varied architectures our clients set as much as ingest billions of information into the lakehouse. I noticed that knowledge ingestion into Databricks helps help important use instances, corresponding to producing a wide range of dashboards or growing tailor-made AI chatbots for his or her organizations.
Defining the client expertise
A significant facet of my function concerned clearly and concisely documenting insights via the info I gathered from clients. This included bettering step-by-step consumer journeys, consolidating buyer suggestions, and analyzing opponents. Ranging from first rules, I appeared for alternatives to take away sharp edges, scale back the variety of steps and context switches, and automate configurations wherever attainable. Given the excessive visibility of those paperwork amongst management—sometimes receiving direct suggestions from our CEO—having crisp and concise documentation was essential.
Alongside the way in which, I collaborated carefully with the world-class engineers on my staff, working in a “two in a field” vogue. This allowed me to not solely mix my buyer insights with their deep technical experience—but in addition to enhance my very own understanding of information engineering techniques. And to validate the options that we designed, we gathered in depth suggestions from distinguished engineers and product managers on complementary groups. Lastly, I labored carefully with UI/UX designers to translate these insights into intuitive interfaces.
Constructing Connections
Past this rewarding work, my internship was crammed with unforgettable experiences that allowed me to discover San Francisco and bond with fellow interns. I attended my first main league baseball recreation watching the San Francisco Giants, visited the intriguing displays on the Exploratorium, and loved the Bay Space R&D cruise (the place we PM interns received second place within the cornhole event). Constructing relationships with such gifted and great folks added a particular dimension to my remaining faculty internship, creating lasting reminiscences that made the summer season much more pleasurable.

Conclusion
My internship at Databricks has been each difficult and rewarding. I gained deep technical insights, honed my communication expertise, and thrived in cross-functional collaboration. These experiences have sharpened my expertise and fueled my drive for product administration. I’m excited to use what I’ve realized to future alternatives and proceed rising on this dynamic discipline.
If you wish to work on cutting-edge initiatives alongside trade leaders, I extremely encourage you to use to work at Databricks! Go to the Databricks Careers web page to study extra about job openings throughout the corporate. Or if you happen to’re able to streamline your knowledge ingestion course of, discover how LakeFlow Join can allow each practitioner to implement knowledge pipelines at scale.