Senior Forward Deployed Architect: Data & AI Solutions

OpenKrill; United States; Hybrid; USD 119,000 - 172,000; Full time

Job summary

Databricks is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to lead production-grade customer projects, owning architecture and end-to-end delivery of data, AI, and application components on the Databricks platform. You will collaborate with engineering, product, and customer teams to shape strategic priorities and ensure secure, scalable implementations.

The role combines hands-on engineering with customer-facing responsibilities, requiring strong communication, adaptability, and a drive to

Qualifications

• Strong years experience in data engineering, data platforms & analytics, or software engineering.
• Comfortable writing code in Python, Scala, JavaScript/TypeScript, and modern frameworks.
• Working knowledge of two or more Cloud ecosystems (AWS, Azure, GCP) with expertise in at least one.
• Deep experience with distributed computing with Apache Spark and knowledge of Spark runtime internals.
• Familiarity with CI/CD for production deployments.
• Working knowledge of MLOps, ML/AI models and AI APIs.
• Design and deployment of performant production architectures combining data pipelines and ML/AI models.
• Experience delivering technical projects with clear scope and timelines.
• Documentation and white-boarding skills.
• Experience with enterprise clients and stakeholder management.
• Willingness to travel 20% of the time.
• Databricks Certification preferred but not essential.

Responsibilities

• Lead production-grade projects delivering reference architectures, data ingestion, and ML/AI model integration.
• Guide transformational big data projects end-to-end from design to deployment.
• Embed with customer teams to ensure adoption and value realization.
• Own architecture decisions ensuring security, scalability, and alignment with best practices.
• Collaborate with Databricks team, Project Manager, Architect and Customer team to meet engagement goals.
• Provide product and implementation feedback to enable rapid issue resolution.
• Develop accelerators, frameworks, and best practices for scale across accounts.

Skills

Data engineering

Programming languages

Cloud platforms

Apache Spark

CI/CD

MLOps

Data architecture

Project delivery

Documentation

Enterprise experience

Travel readiness

Databricks Certification

Tools

Databricks

Job description

Databricks is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to lead production-grade customer projects, owning architecture and end-to-end delivery of data, AI, and application components on the Databricks platform. You will collaborate with engineering, product, and customer teams to shape strategic priorities and ensure secure, scalable implementations.

The role combines hands-on engineering with customer-facing responsibilities, requiring strong communication, adaptability, and a drive to