Databricks said on 19 October that it is doubling its New York office at 5 Bryant Park to approximately 120,000 square feet across five floors, adding space for research and customer meetings, according to a company announcement.
Key points
- The expansion will add a dedicated Engineering and Research floor and an Executive Briefing Center.
- Databricks plans to increase its New York headcount as its AI research, infrastructure and applications teams grow.
- The city’s teams work on reinforcement learning, Unity Gateway and the CustomerLake application, according to Databricks.
Five floors at 5 Bryant Park
The company opened a New York research and development hub at the Bryant Park address earlier in 2026. Its new space is intended to accommodate further hiring in the city, as well as its existing engineering, research and commercial teams, Databricks said.
One of the five floors will be set aside for Engineering and Research work. Databricks also plans improved space for its go-to-market teams and an Executive Briefing Center, giving customer discussions a dedicated place alongside the technical work at the site.
Databricks points to access to technology workers and nearby enterprise customers as reasons for expanding in Manhattan. The company says a recent study identified New York as the largest technology talent hub in the US. It also cites the city’s concentration of businesses in financial services, media, healthcare and retail — industries whose customers can work with its engineers on AI products.
The company names Columbia, NYU and Princeton among the institutions contributing to the area’s hiring pool. New York’s time zone also overlaps with major talent hubs in Europe and India, according to Databricks. Databricks plans to keep adding staff in the city as it expands the office.
New York research feeds Genie and Unity Gateway
Databricks says its New York office houses its Chief AI Scientist and research teams working on technology used by Genie and Unity Gateway. Their areas include reinforcement learning, large-scale information retrieval and the evaluation of AI agents for enterprise use.
That places research staff near teams building AI infrastructure and applications at the same site. The company describes the New York operation as one of its centres for moving research into products used by organisations. The dedicated research floor is part of the announced expansion rather than a separate new location.
Databricks says more than 20,000 organisations use its Data + AI Platform, including adidas, AT&T, Bayer, Bock, Mastercard, OpenAI, Rivian and Unilever. It also says its products are used by 70% of the Fortune 500. Those are company-wide customer figures, rather than figures for work carried out at the New York office.
Unity Gateway and CustomerLake teams in New York
New York infrastructure teams work on Unity Gateway, which Databricks describes as an AI gateway used by many large enterprises. The product lets customers govern spending and choose among models and providers, the company says. It can route a workload to an underlying model selected for that task rather than use the most expensive large language model by default.
Databricks also says Unity Gateway provides access and security controls for customer data and intellectual property. Those functions connect the New York team’s infrastructure work to the company’s enterprise offering, where decisions about model use, cost and data access sit alongside the AI applications themselves.
The city’s applications team contributes to CustomerLake, which Databricks describes as an agentic application for customer data and marketing built into its Lakehouse platform. The expanded 5 Bryant Park site will bring that work, the Unity Gateway teams and the company’s AI researchers together across five floors.
.jpg){kind=link}