Sr. Forward Deployed Engineer - FDE (Fullstack)
About this role
Builders who thrive at the intersection of technology and business impact will enjoy solving complex data and AI challenges in this customer-facing role. The Forward Deployed Engineering team collaborates cross-functionally with product, engineering, and developer relations to shape strategic initiatives while delivering production-grade systems on the Databricks platform. Team members own architectural decisions, build end-to-end applications spanning data engineering and machine learning, and embed directly with enterprise clients to ensure successful technical adoption. Individuals who combine deep software or data engineering expertise with strong customer empathy and adaptability do well here.
What you will do
- Lead impactful customer technical projects by delivering production-grade systems, reference architectures, custom applications, and data ingestion and ML/AI model integration.
- Guide strategic customers through the end-to-end design, build, and deployment of big data and AI applications.
- Collaborate with engagement managers to scope technical delivery work based on customer input.
- Bootstrap or implement customer projects to facilitate the successful evaluation and adoption of Databricks.
- Own architecture and design decisions to ensure solutions remain secure, scalable, and aligned with best practices.
- Contribute accelerators, frameworks, and best practices that scale impact across accounts and influence the product roadmap.
- Travel to customer locations approximately 20% of the time.
What you need
- Bring six or more years of professional experience in software engineering, data engineering, or data platforms and analytics.
- Demonstrate comfort writing code in Python, Scala, JavaScript, or TypeScript alongside modern frameworks.
- Possess working knowledge of at least two common cloud ecosystems including AWS, Azure, and GCP, with deep expertise in at least one.
- Demonstrate deep experience with distributed computing utilizing Apache Spark and knowledge of its runtime internals.
- Maintain familiarity with CI/CD pipelines for production deployments alongside working knowledge of MLOps, AI APIs, and machine learning models.
- Design and deploy performant production end-to-end data architectures combining data pipelines, user-facing interfaces, and AI models.
- Manage technical project scope, timelines, and measurable outcomes while working directly with enterprise clients.
Nice to have
- Databricks Certification
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the travel requirement for this role?
Travel to customer sites is required 20% of the time.
What kind of teams will I work with?
You will embed with customer teams ranging from technical individual contributors to executives, while also collaborating internally with engineering, product, and developer relations.
What technical background is expected?
Candidates need at least six years of experience in data engineering, data platforms, analytics, or software engineering, along with deep expertise in distributed computing with Apache Spark.