Databricks
Sr. AI Engineer — FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer), U.S. Federal Sector
Why it's interesting
Databricks already runs a broad commercial FDE org; now it's carving out a clearance-gated U.S. Federal AI-FDE track ($200K–$300K, employer-provided) requiring US citizenship and eligibility for a Secret clearance. The federal FDE land-grab — AWS, Cognition, Scale, and now Databricks — is where the least salary-transparent but highest-margin deployment work is quietly concentrating.
The role
Sr. AI Engineer on Databricks' AI Forward Deployed Engineering (AI FDE) team, a specialized customer-facing group delivering professional-services engagements that build and productionize first-of-its-kind GenAI applications for U.S. Federal customers. Owns architecture and end-to-end delivery spanning data engineering, AI, and application development on the Databricks platform; builds RAG, multi-agent systems, Text2SQL, and fine-tuning with tools like HuggingFace, LangChain, and DSPy. Requires production GenAI/ML deployment experience on AWS/Azure/GCP, a graduate degree in a quantitative field, U.S. citizenship, and eligibility for a U.S. government Secret clearance; based in the DC/MD/VA metro, hybrid with 20–25% customer travel. Verified live on databricks.com/careers.
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