Lead Data Architect (AI/ML)

Location: Herndon, Virginia; candidates must reside in one of these states: California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, or West Virginia.

Salary: $160,000–$190,000 USD per year.

Company

hirify.global develops technology solutions for the U.S. Government.

What you will do

• Architect and implement batch and streaming enterprise data platforms for ML, LLM, and GenAI workloads.
• Design and operate Databricks workspaces, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake patterns, cluster policies, and performance optimization.
• Build end-to-end data pipelines for ingestion, transformation, feature engineering, and serving using PySpark, Spark SQL, and Databricks Jobs.
• Operationalize model training, LLM fine-tuning, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, experiment tracking, and rollout strategies.
• Implement embedding, vector-store, retrieval, RAG, observability, data quality, governance, lineage, and access-control solutions.
• Lead architecture and code reviews, technical deep dives, and mentoring for engineering teams while collaborating with data scientists, product owners, and security.

Requirements

• 8+ years of hands-on experience in data engineering or platform architecture, including 3+ years in an architect or lead role.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field.
• Active AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty certification or equivalent AWS certification is required.
• Hands-on expertise with Databricks, Spark, PySpark, Python, MLflow, SQL, ML/LLM pipelines, vector embeddings, semantic search, and RAG architectures.
• Experience with cloud platforms, containerization, orchestration, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, data governance, security, IAM, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S.; candidates in H-1B status may be considered if eligible for transfer. Eligibility to obtain a security clearance is required.

Nice to have

• Experience with Unity Catalog, Photon, Databricks SQL, vector databases, LangChain, LlamaIndex, AWS Bedrock, or other managed LLM services.
• Experience with Kafka, Kinesis, Structured Streaming, Databricks Certified Professional certification, Great Expectations, Soda, Airflow, or Prefect.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative environment focused on innovation, learning, and professional growth.
• Work supports U.S. Government technology initiatives.
• Hiring decisions are made through human review by talent acquisition and hiring managers.
• Employment is subject to applicable federal, state, local, and international equal-opportunity protections.