Sr. Forward Deployed Engineer - National Security (Data & AI)

Location: Hybrid in Boston, Massachusetts, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, or remotely from California, New York, or Washington, D.C.; travel to customer locations 20–25% of the time.

Base salary: $182,000–$250,208 USD per year, with potential annual performance bonus, equity, and benefits.

Company

Databricks provides a unified data and AI platform used by organizations worldwide to build and scale data applications, analytics, and AI solutions.

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 engagement managers, project managers, architects, engineers, customer support, and customer stakeholders.
• Create reusable accelerators, frameworks, and best practices that scale across accounts and inform the product roadmap.

Requirements

• U.S. citizenship and eligibility for a U.S. government Secret clearance are required to access classified information.
• 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 and knowledge of Spark runtime internals.
• Experience with CI/CD, MLOps, ML/AI models, AI APIs, production data architectures, technical project delivery, documentation, and enterprise clients.

Nice to have

• Active Secret or higher security clearance.
• Databricks Certification.
• Advanced expertise in MLOps, ML/AI models, and AI APIs.

Culture & Benefits

• Customer-facing, hands-on work focused on measurable technical and business outcomes.
• Cross-functional collaboration with engineering, product, developer relations, and customer teams.
• Comprehensive employee benefits and perks, varying by region.
• Inclusive workplace with equal employment opportunity standards.