Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) (Public Sector)

Location: Hybrid role associated with Alabama, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.; travel to customer locations 20–25% of the time. The role requires an active Secret or Top Secret clearance.

Base salary: $182,000–$250,208 USD annually, depending on location and candidate factors.

Company

Databricks provides a unified Data and AI Platform used to build and scale data applications, analytics, and AI systems.

What you will do

• Build and productionize data, AI, and application solutions for federal government customers.
• Own architecture and lead design decisions for secure, scalable end-to-end systems.
• Design and deliver reference architectures, custom applications, data ingestion, and ML/AI model integrations.
• Guide customers through architecture, implementation, evaluation, and adoption of Databricks solutions.
• Collaborate with engineers, project managers, architects, customer support, and customer stakeholders from technical contributors to executives.
• Create reusable accelerators, frameworks, and best practices while providing feedback that influences the product roadmap.

Requirements

• Active Secret or Top Secret clearance required.
• 6+ years of experience in data engineering, data platforms and analytics, or software engineering.
• Fluency in Python, Scala, JavaScript/TypeScript, and modern frameworks.
• Working knowledge of at least two cloud ecosystems among AWS, Azure, and GCP, with expertise in one.
• Deep experience with distributed computing using Apache Spark, including Spark runtime internals.
• Experience with CI/CD, MLOps, ML/AI models and APIs, production data architectures, technical delivery, documentation, and enterprise stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Expertise in MLOps, ML/AI models, and AI APIs.
• Databricks Certification.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on, customer-facing work focused on measurable technical and business outcomes.
• Cross-functional collaboration with engineering, product, developer relations, project management, and customer support.
• Comprehensive employee benefits and region-specific perks.
• Annual performance bonus and equity may be included in the total compensation package.