Databricks doubles its New York office to 120,000 square feet

What the expansion includes

According to Databricks, the expanded space will include a dedicated Engineering and Research floor "purpose-built for focused R&D work". It will also add enhanced spaces for go-to-market teams, an Executive Briefing Center, and room for significant future growth.

The company opened its New York R&D hub at 5 Bryant Park earlier this year. Databricks describes that opening as a bet that world-class AI would be built in Manhattan, and says the bet is now paying off. It also states that its New York office is one of the largest concentrations of AI research talent in the city.

Why Databricks picked New York

Databricks gives three reasons for deepening its presence in the city.

• Industry proximity: The company calls New York the global nerve center for financial services, media, healthcare and retail, with by far the most Fortune 500 companies headquartered there. Databricks says its engineers build AI products alongside the enterprises that deploy them.
• Talent pipeline: Institutions such as Columbia, NYU and Princeton, together with a startup and venture capital scene, produce a deep pipeline of AI and engineering talent, according to the company. It cites a recent study that named New York the largest tech talent hub in the country.
• Global reach: New York offers the most time zone overlap in the US with major talent hubs in Europe and India, which Databricks sees as a way to connect its worldwide teams and attract international talent.

What the New York teams work on

Databricks says its New York teams cover research, infrastructure and applications. The office is home to the company's Chief AI Scientist and to research teams building the technologies behind Genie and Unity Gateway. Their specialities are reinforcement learning, large-scale information retrieval and the evaluation of enterprise AI agents.

On the infrastructure side, the teams work on Unity Gateway, which Databricks describes as the main AI gateway for many of the biggest enterprises in the world. According to the company, it gives enterprises governance over cost, model and provider selection. It can, for example, automatically route workloads to the most appropriate underlying model instead of defaulting to the most expensive LLM, and it provides access and security controls to protect data assets and IP.

In applications, the New York team is a major contributor to Lakehouse-embedded agentic vertical applications. One example is CustomerLake, which Databricks calls its next-generation agentic app for customer data and marketing.

What it means

The expansion signals that Databricks intends to keep building research and engineering capacity in New York rather than only sales and customer-facing roles, given the dedicated Engineering and Research floor. The company says its platform is used by over 20,000 organizations, including adidas, AT&T, Bayer, Mastercard, OpenAI, Rivian and Unilever, and 70% of the Fortune 500. For job seekers, Databricks points to its careers site for open roles in the city. The source gives no figures for current or planned headcount.