Lead Databricks Architect - Remote

Bounteous; United States; On-site; USD 143,000 - 192,000; Full time

Job summary

Bounteous is seeking a Lead Databricks Engineer/Architect to design, build, and scale a cloud‑based lakehouse platform on Databricks across AWS, Azure, or GCP.

You will own end‑to‑end data ecosystem architecture, mentor engineers, and set standards for ingestion, governance, and performance optimization. This role partners with data science teams to productionize ML workloads and collaborate with security to ensure data privacy and compliance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of data engineering experience, with 4+ years building production workloads on Databricks.
• Deep expertise in Apache Spark (PySpark & Spark SQL) — including performance tuning, partitioning strategy, and Catalyst/Photon execution models.
• Strong hands-on experience with Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Databricks Workflows, and Delta Live Tables.
• Production experience on at least one major cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including networking, IAM, storage (S3/ADLS/GCS), and compute primitives.
• Proficiency in Python and SQL; comfort with Scala is a plus.
• Experience designing medallion architectures and dimensional models for analytics.
• Strong CI/CD and DevOps practice: Git, Terraform, Databricks Asset Bundles or dbx, automated testing of data pipelines.
• Track record of leading technical projects end-to-end and mentoring engineers.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to drive alignment with both engineering and business stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Architect and lead the implementation of an enterprise lakehouse on Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Photon, Workflows) across one or more major clouds (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Design scalable batch and streaming data pipelines using PySpark, Spark SQL, Structured Streaming, and Delta Live Tables; establish patterns for ingestion from operational systems, event streams, and third‑party APIs.
• Define and enforce platform standards for data modeling (medallion architecture), CI/CD, code quality, testing, observability, and cost optimization.
• Lead the governance strategy using Unity Catalog — fine‑grained access control, data lineage, audit, and PII handling — in partnership with security and compliance.
• Optimize Spark workloads for performance and cost: cluster sizing, Photon, autoscaling, file layout, Z‑ordering, caching, and query tuning.
• Partner with ML engineers and data scientists to operationalize models using MLflow, feature stores, and model serving on Databricks.
• Own the cloud infrastructure footprint for the platform: networking, IAM, secrets, encryption, and Terraform/IaC for Databricks workspaces and supporting services.
• Mentor a team of data engineers; lead architecture reviews, code reviews, and technical design sessions; raise the bar on engineering practices.
• Engage with stakeholders across analytics, product, and finance to translate business needs into a roadmap for the data platform.

Skills

Databricks

PySpark

Spark SQL

Delta Lake

Unity Catalog

AWS

Azure

GCP

Python

SQL

Terraform

Data governance

Mentoring

Tools

Databricks Platform

Job description

Bounteous is seeking a Lead Databricks Engineer/Architect to design, build, and scale a cloud‑based lakehouse platform on Databricks across AWS, Azure, or GCP.

You will own end‑to‑end data ecosystem architecture, mentor engineers, and set standards for ingestion, governance, and performance optimization. This role partners with data science teams to productionize ML workloads and collaborate with security to ensure data privacy and compliance.