US IT data-processing company Databricks has announced that it will open a development center in Belgrade, Serbia, which will join “existing R&D centers in Amsterdam, Bengaluru, Berlin, San Francisco, and Seattle, playing a pivotal role in the future trajectory of our product and engineering expansion. “
“Serbian engineers have left an indelible mark on the world, with luminaries such as Nikola Tesla or Mihajlo Pupin shaping our modern landscape,” Databricks said in a company press release. “In recent years, Serbia’s thriving tech ecosystem has become one of the backbones of advances in databases, cloud infrastructure, and artificial intelligence — the very pillars upon which Databricks was established and continues to innovate. We are eager to draw upon the region’s rich vein of technical expertise.”
Databricks is an American enterprise software company that develops a web-based platform for working with Spark, which provides automated cluster management and IPython-style notebooks.
A of 2019 Microsoft was a noted investor, and the company boasted a USD 28 bln post-money valuation in February 2021. Other investors include Amazon Web Services, CapitalG (a growth equity firm under Alphabet Inc.) and Salesforce Ventures. The company noted that it was searching for “world-class engineers” to join the Belgrade team, and that it had hired Dragan Tomic, who boasts “two decades of experience at Microsoft’s renowned database group and as a founding member of Microsoft Development Center Serbia (MDCS).”
The copany said that Tomic will serve as the VP of Engineering and lead our Belgrade site.
Other high-level hires include Ivan Mitic and Tamara Novkovic, with the former most recently was responsible for the performance and efficiency of Meta’s internal data warehousing systems.
“After over a decade in the United States, Ivan will return to his roots in Belgrade to join the Databricks site.” The company said. Novkovic is an experienced recruiter that helped build out TomTom and Microsoft’s local development teams.
Belgrade photo by Sharon Hahn Darlin, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
