Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) (Data & AI)

Location: West Coast, United States; San Francisco Bay Area preferred. Candidates should be based in the San Francisco Bay Area, willing to relocate there, or able to travel to the area at least one week per month. Travel to customers is required 20% of the time.

Salary: $182,000–$250,208 USD annually, with potential annual performance bonus and equity.

Company

Databricks is a data and AI company providing a unified platform for data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and AI application development.

What you will do

• Build and productionize customer solutions spanning data engineering, AI, analytics, and application development.
• Design and implement production-grade data architectures, reference architectures, custom applications, data ingestion systems, and ML/AI integrations.
• Lead architecture and design decisions to deliver secure, scalable solutions aligned with customer needs and platform best practices.
• Guide enterprise customers through implementation, evaluation, adoption, and technical enablement of Databricks solutions.
• Work with project managers, architects, engineering, support, and customer teams to deliver projects and resolve implementation issues.
• Create reusable accelerators, frameworks, and best practices that scale across customer accounts and inform the product roadmap.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience in data engineering, data platforms and analytics, or software engineering.
• Professional coding experience with Python, Scala, JavaScript/TypeScript, and modern frameworks.
• Working knowledge of at least two cloud ecosystems among AWS, Azure, and GCP, with expertise in at least one.
• Deep experience with distributed computing using Apache Spark, including knowledge of Spark runtime internals.
• Experience with CI/CD, MLOps, ML/AI models, AI APIs, and production end-to-end data architectures.
• Experience delivering technical projects for enterprise clients, managing scope and timelines, documenting solutions, and handling broad stakeholder relationships.

Nice to have

• Databricks Certification.
• Curiosity and adaptability when exploring technologies for Databricks-based solution deployment and integration.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on, customer-facing work at the intersection of technology and business impact.
• Cross-functional collaboration with engineering, product, developer relations, customer support, project management, and customer teams.
• Comprehensive benefits and perks tailored to the employee's region.
• Commitment to diversity, inclusion, and equal employment opportunity.