Senior Databricks Architect (10–15 years)

Role Overview

Senior platform and solution architect responsible for enterprise-scale Databricks lakehouse architecture,

modernization strategies, governance, migration roadmaps, engineering standards, performance and cost guardrails, and AI-ready data foundations. The role converts business and non-functional requirements into implementable platform patterns and guides engineering teams through delivery.

Core Responsibilities

Lakehouse &

- Platform Architecture


- Define target-state lakehouse architecture, workspace and workplace strategy, Unity Catalog topology,

storage and compute patterns, governed sharing, lineage and domain boundaries.



- Establish implementation standards for Medallion architecture, Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines / DLT,

Workflows, Auto Loader, Delta Lake, system tables and Databricks Asset Bundles.



- Create reference architectures, architecture decision records, reusable blueprints and non-functional requirement guardrails.

Spark, Data Engineering &
- Streaming


- Set engineering standards for PySpark, Spark SQL, Delta Lake, Structured Streaming, CDC, SCD,

incremental processing, data contracts and schema evolution.



- Guide execution-plan analysis, AQE, join strategy, shuffle and skew management, partitioning, file sizing,

caching and Photon adoption.



- Drive idempotent, auditable and recoverable pipelines with clear batch-versus-streaming decision rationale.

Migration &
- Modernization


- Lead legacy warehouse, Hadoop and ETL modernization assessments and define migration waves,

conversion patterns and dependency plans.



- Own validation, reconciliation, parallel-run, cutover, rollback and decommissioning approaches.


- Create reusable migration playbooks and accelerators while controlling delivery risk and business continuity.

Governance, Security &
- Data Sharing


- Design Unity Catalog operating patterns covering catalogs, schemas, external locations, service principals,

RBAC/ABAC, masking,



row/column controls and auditability.



- Define lineage, data quality, privacy, retention and compliance-ready implementation standards.


- Guide Delta Sharing, Lakehouse Federation and governed producer-consumer patterns where appropriate.

Platform Engineering, DataOps &
- Reliability


- Define Git-based CI/CD, testing, environment promotion, infrastructure-as-code and release controls for

Databricks assets.



- Establish SLIs/SLOs, observability, alerting, runbooks, reliability scorecards and production-readiness reviews using platform telemetry and system tables.


- Improve developer experience through templates, reusable frameworks, guardrails and self-service patterns.

Cost Optimization &
- FinOps


- Establish cluster and compute policies, autoscaling, workload sizing, serverless decision guidelines, tagging and chargeback/showback controls.


- Create cost and performance baselines and drive workload-level optimization with measurable outcomes.


- Balance performance, reliability and cost rather than optimizing one dimension in isolation.

Databricks Hiring JD Pack v2
- C5–C6

AI-ready Data Foundations 
- Guide governed data foundations for RAG and AI use cases, including data quality, lineage, access controls and retrieval readiness.


- Demonstrate working awareness of Vector Search, model serving/lifecycle, MLflow, context engineering and

AI governance.



- Assess emerging capabilities without weakening core data engineering and platform-accountability expectations.

Consulting &
- Stakeholder Leadership


- Lead discovery and architecture workshops; articulate options, trade-offs, risks, roadmap and estimates to technical and business stakeholders.


- Explain the latest project with clear business problem, architecture choice, Databricks fit, alternatives considered, challenges, outcomes and lessons learned.


- Mentor engineers and leads, review designs, and support proposals, solution narratives and customer-facing architecture discussions.

Skills: databricks,architect,data platform

📌 Senior Databricks Architect (10–15+ years) (Hyderabad)
🏢 Zorba AI
📍 Hyderabad