Databricks SME

Job Description - Databricks Engineer

Role:	Databricks SME
Location:	All EXL Location
Work Mode:	Hybrid

Key Role and Responsibilities

Role Overview

We are looking for a skilled and passionate Databricks Engineer to design, build, and optimize enterprise-scale data lakehouse solutions on the Databricks platform. The successful candidate will be responsible for creating Databricks pipeline delivering Financial Crime platforms covering Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), Customer Risk Assessment (CRA), Sanctions Screening, Transaction Monitoring, Fraud Detection, and Regulatory Reporting.

Position Details

Job Title:	Databricks Engineer
Department:	Client Delivery / Data & AI Engineering
Experience Required:	8-10+ Years (overall) | 5+ Years Databricks hands-on
Employment Type:	Full-Time
Location:	Hybrid (as per business requirement)

Key Responsibilities

Databricks Platform Engineering

• Design, build, and maintain Databricks workspaces, clusters, and compute pools across dev/test/prod environments.
• Configure and manage Databricks Unity Catalog for data governance, access control, fine-grained permissions, and data lineage.
• Optimize cluster configurations — instance types, auto-scaling policies, spot/preemptible nodes — for cost and performance.
• Implement workspace-level best practices: folder structures, access controls, secret management (Databricks Secrets / Azure Key Vault / AWS Secrets Manager).
• Manage Databricks jobs, workflows, and multi-task job orchestration with dependency management.

Delta Lake & Lakehouse Architecture

• Design and implement Delta Lake tables with appropriate partitioning, Z-ordering, and file compaction (OPTIMIZE / VACUUM).
• Build Medallion Architecture (Bronze / Silver / Gold) layers for structured data lake organization.
• Implement Delta Live Tables (DLT) pipelines for declarative, reliable ETL/ELT with built-in data quality expectations.
• Manage schema evolution, table versioning, time travel, and Change Data Feed (CDF) for incremental processing.
• Design data lakehouse patterns integrating Delta Lake with external systems (Kafka, ADLS, S3, GCS).

Data Pipeline Development (PySpark / SQL)

• Develop scalable batch and streaming data pipelines using PySpark, Spark SQL, and Delta Lake.
• Build structured streaming pipelines for real-time ingestion from Kafka, Event Hubs, and Kinesis into Delta tables.
• Write optimized PySpark transformations leveraging broadcast joins, adaptive query execution (AQE), and dynamic partition pruning.
• Create reusable transformation libraries, utility frameworks, and pipeline templates for team productivity.
• Implement robust error handling, retry logic, and dead-letter queue patterns in production pipelines.

MLflow & AI/ML Workloads

• Set up and manage MLflow tracking servers, experiment registries, and model lifecycle management on Databricks.
• Support data scientists and ML engineers in deploying model training and inference workloads on Databricks clusters and GPU instances.
• Build feature engineering pipelines using Databricks Feature Store for reusable, versioned ML features.
• Enable GenAI workloads — LLM fine-tuning, RAG pipeline development, and vector search (Databricks Vector Search / Mosaic AI).
• Implement MLOps practices: model versioning, A/B testing, model serving via Databricks Model Serving endpoints.

Cloud Integration & DevOps

• Integrate Databricks with cloud-native services: Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS).
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for Databricks notebooks and jobs using Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.
• Implement Databricks Asset Bundles (DABs) or Terraform for infrastructure-as-code (IaC) deployment of Databricks resources.
• Manage data ingestion using Auto Loader, COPY INTO, and partner integrations (Fivetran, dbt, Airbyte).
• Monitor pipeline health, cluster utilization, and costs using Databricks system tables and cloud cost management tools.

Governance, Security & Optimization

• Implement row-level security, column masking, and dynamic data views using Unity Catalog policies.
• Ensure data quality enforcement using Delta Live Tables expectations and Great Expectations integrations.
• Conduct performance tuning — query plan analysis, caching strategies, Photon engine enablement.
• Maintain data cataloging, metadata management, and data lineage tracking within Unity Catalog.
• Document architecture decisions, runbooks, and operational guides for Databricks workloads.

Required Qualifications

Education

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Data Engineering, or related field.

Experience

• 10+ years of total experience in data engineering or software engineering.
• 3+ years of dedicated hands-on experience with the Databricks platform in production environments.
• Strong background in big data engineering, cloud data platforms, and distributed computing.

Databricks Platform

• Deep expertise in Databricks Workspaces, Clusters, Jobs, Workflows, and Repos.
• Proficiency with Unity Catalog — metastore setup, catalog/schema/table management, access controls, and data lineage.
• Hands-on experience with Delta Live Tables (DLT) — pipeline development, expectations, and monitoring.
• Strong command of Delta Lake internals — transaction log, ACID guarantees, file layout, and optimization techniques.
• Experience with Databricks SQL Warehouses, SQL Analytics, and dashboard creation.
• Knowledge of Databricks Photon engine, serverless compute, and cost optimization strategies.

PySpark & SQL

• 4+ years of PySpark development — DataFrames, Datasets, Spark SQL, RDD operations.
• Expert-level SQL — window functions, lateral joins, CTEs, recursive queries, and analytical functions.
• Experience with Spark performance tuning — AQE, query plans (EXPLAIN), partitioning, and caching.
• Proficiency with Python for pipeline development, utilities, and automation.

Cloud Platforms

• Hands-on experience with at least one: Azure (ADLS Gen2, ADF, Azure Databricks), AWS (S3, EMR, Glue, AWS Databricks), or GCP (GCS, BigQuery, Dataproc).
• Experience with cloud networking for Databricks: VNet/VPC injection, private endpoints, and firewall configurations.
• Familiarity with IAM roles, managed identities, and service principal authentication for Databricks.

MLflow & ML Engineering (Nice to Have)

• Working knowledge of MLflow — experiment tracking, model registry, and deployment.
• Experience supporting ML pipelines on Databricks for training, evaluation, and serving.
• Exposure to Databricks Feature Store and Mosaic AI / GenAI capabilities.

Preferred Certifications

• Databricks Certified Associate Developer for Apache Spark (PySpark or Scala).
• Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate / Professional — strongly preferred.
• Databricks Certified Machine Learning Associate / Professional.
• Azure Data Engineer Associate (DP-203) / AWS Data Analytics Specialty / GCP Professional Data Engineer.
• dbt Analytics Engineer Certification.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with dbt (data build tool) for SQL-based transformation on Databricks SQL.
• Knowledge of Apache Kafka / Confluent for real-time streaming into Databricks.
• Familiarity with Terraform or Pulumi for Databricks infrastructure-as-code.
• Exposure to Apache Iceberg or Apache Hudi in addition to Delta Lake.
• Experience with BI tool integration: Power BI, Tableau, or Looker connected to Databricks SQL.
• Knowledge of data mesh principles and federated data governance at scale.
• Domain experience in BFSI, Healthcare, Retail, or Manufacturing data programs.

Core Competencies

• Deep technical depth in Databricks with the ability to architect and troubleshoot complex lakehouse systems.
• Strong problem-solving skills — ability to diagnose pipeline failures, performance bottlenecks, and data quality issues.
• Collaborative team player comfortable working with data engineers, ML engineers, and business stakeholders.
• Excellent documentation and communication skills for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Continuous learner — actively keeps pace with Databricks platform updates and the broader data/AI ecosystem.
• Delivery-oriented mindset with experience in Agile/Scrum delivery environments.