Databricks DBA/Administrator/SME

Overview of the Role:

The Senior SME - Databricks DBA / Administrator serves as the senior technical authority for administration, security, governance, performance, and reliability of an enterprise Databricks environment supporting federal analytics workloads. The role combines hands-on platform administration with technical leadership, automation, operational support, and cloud/data governance expertise.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities:

• Administer Databricks workspaces, compute, SQL warehouses, jobs/workflows, users, groups, service principals, policies, and platform configurations.
• Administer Databricks SQL, Delta Lake objects, catalogs, schemas, tables, views, permissions, and performance tuning for large analytical workloads.
• Implement and manage Unity Catalog governance, lineage, metadata, access controls, secure data sharing, and least-privilege permissions.
• Automate platform provisioning and administration using Terraform, Databricks APIs/CLI, Python, Git, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Integrate Databricks with AWS networking, IAM, storage, secrets, logging, monitoring, and enterprise security services.
• Monitor platform health and cost, troubleshoot complex production issues, lead root-cause analysis, and establish operational standards and runbooks.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, Database Administration, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of database, data platform, cloud, or infrastructure experience, including significant hands-on Databricks administration experience.
• Expert knowledge of Databricks administration, Databricks SQL, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, advanced SQL, and performance optimization.
• Strong AWS, IAM, networking, security, monitoring, Terraform, Python/scripting, Git, and CI/CD experience.
• Experience with enterprise data governance, access control, audit logging, availability, incident response, and cost optimization.
• Experience supporting federal or regulated environments and familiarity with FISMA, NIST 800-53, FedRAMP, and ATO processes.
• Preferred certifications include Databricks Data Engineer, AWS, Terraform, CISSP/Security+, or comparable credentials.