The Databricks incident where the most senior engineer never touched the keyboard

Thursday, just after two in the afternoon. The first message doesn't come from an alert, it comes from a person in revenue operations: the biggest region jumped overnight and nobody sold anything new. Nobody answers.

The engineer who owns the nightly Lakeflow job finds it in the run history. An overnight failure, a restart before anyone was awake, a window of orders written a second time under every executive dashboard in the company.

So the fixing starts immediately. Head down, no message, because typing in the channel feels like stealing time from the fix. Which is how a second engineer…