Databricks Architect

Databricks Architect

Location: New York — Hybrid

Engagement: Contract-to-hire

Industry: Consulting

We are seeking a Databricks Architect to join a consulting business, supporting clients from initial discovery and pre-sales through to hands-on implementation and post-sales delivery.

This role combines technical architecture, practical engineering and client engagement. You will translate business requirements into Databricks solutions, confidently present recommendations to stakeholders, and remain directly involved in building and delivering those solutions.

Key responsibilities

• Lead client discovery sessions to understand business objectives, technical requirements and existing data environments.
• Support pre-sales activities through solution design, technical presentations, demonstrations and proof-of-concept development.
• Help define project scope, delivery approach, technical dependencies and effort estimates.
• Design scalable Databricks architectures covering data ingestion, transformation, storage, governance and consumption.
• Remain highly hands-on, developing production pipelines and implementing solutions using Python, PySpark and SQL.
• Lead post-sales technical delivery, ensuring implementations align with the agreed architecture and client requirements.
• Advise clients on Databricks platform configuration, security, governance, performance and cost optimisation.
• Troubleshoot complex technical issues and guide engineering teams through implementation challenges.
• Communicate architectural decisions and trade-offs clearly to both technical and business stakeholders.
• Establish engineering standards, review code and support knowledge transfer to client teams.

Required experience

• Strong experience architecting and delivering Databricks solutions in production.
• Proven client-facing consulting experience across both pre-sales and post-sales engagements.
• Strong hands-on engineering skills in Python, PySpark and SQL.
• Experience designing lakehouse architectures and building reliable ETL/ELT pipelines using Delta Lake.
• Practical knowledge of Databricks platform capabilities, including Unity Catalog, orchestration and compute configuration.
• Experience implementing Databricks on a major cloud platform such as AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Understanding of data security, access controls, governance and deployment practices.
• Ability to turn ambiguous business requirements into clear technical designs and working solutions.
• Confident presentation and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to explain complex concepts clearly.
• Willingness to work on a hybrid basis in New York and join through a contract-to-hire arrangement.