Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Sr FDE (L5)
Databricks · Posted Oct 19
Data, analytics, machine learning, and generative AI intelligence platform services
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About the role
Databricks is the Data and AI company, whose unified Data + AI Platform — including Genie, Lakebase, Agent Bricks, Lakeflow, Lakehouse, and Unity Catalog — is used by more than 20,000 organizations worldwide. Forward Deployed Engineers work directly with customers to build and productionize solutions to their data and AI challenges on the platform, owning architecture and implementing end-to-end systems across data engineering, AI, and application development. This senior, customer-facing role leads technical delivery for strategic enterprise accounts while contributing reusable accelerators and product feedback.
What you will do
- Production Solution Delivery: Lead impactful customer technical projects by delivering production-grade systems, designing and building reference architectures, custom applications, and data ingestion and ML/AI model integration
- Transformational Impact: Guide strategic customers as they implement transformational big data projects including end-to-end design, build and deployment of industry-leading big data and AI applications. Work with engagement managers to scope technical delivery work with input from the customer
- Empower Customers: Guide customers on architecture and design; bootstrap or implement customer projects which leads to a customers' successful understanding, evaluation and adoption of Databricks.
- Own the Architecture: Lead architecture and design decisions, ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, and aligned with both customer needs and Databricks best practices.
- Work with the Databricks technical team, Project Manager, Architect and Customer team to ensure the technical components of the engagement are delivered to meet customer's needs.
- Work with Engineering and Databricks Customer Support to provide product and implementation feedback and to guide rapid resolution for engagement specific product and support issues.
- Customer Immersion: Embed with customer teams, engaging with stakeholders from technical ICs to executives to deeply understand challenges and deliver impact.
- Reusable Assets & Scale: Contribute accelerators, frameworks, and best practices that scale impact across accounts and influence the Databricks product roadmap.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- 9+ years of experience in data engineering, data platforms & analytics, or software engineering
- Comfortable writing code in either Python, Scala, JavaScript/TypeScript, and modern frameworks
- Working knowledge of two or more common 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 end-to-end data architectures and applications that combine data pipelines, ML/AI models, and user-facing interfaces.
- Experience with technical project delivery - managing scope, timelines and measurable outcomes, translating complex concepts into actionable solutions.
- Documentation and white-boarding skills.
- Experience working with enterprise clients and managing conflicts across a broad stakeholder range
- Build skills in technical areas, and demonstrate curiosity, adaptability, and eagerness to explore new technologies which support the deployment and integration of Databricks-based solutions to complete customer projects.
- Travel to customers 20% of the time
- Databricks Certification
Benefits and support
- Compensation and benefits are detailed in the job posting
About Databricks
Databricks is a data and artificial intelligence company that provides a unified Data Intelligence Platform built on a lakehouse architecture. The platform combines data engineering, data warehousing, machine learning, and generative AI to help organizations manage and scale their data assets natively across major cloud providers. Founded by the original creators of Apache Spark, Databricks enables thousands of enterprises worldwide to power advanced analytics, business intelligence, and autonomous AI agents.
- Industry
- Data and AI Platform Software
- Company size
- 17300+ employees
- Founded
- 2013
- Location
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Funding stage
- Private Company
Funding
Private Company · $25.2B raised
- 2026-08-13Series L$5.0B
Leadership
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer
Co-founder and Executive Chairman
Chief Financial Officer
Co-founder and Chief Architect
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