Senior Forward Deployed Engineer & Databricks AI Lead
15+ years of experience
A forward deployed engineer and data and AI lead with 15+ years in data engineering, analytics and AI. Builds production generative AI and lakehouse solutions on Databricks for global consumer-brand and manufacturing organisations, working between business owners, engineering teams and platform teams to turn loosely defined problems into secure, cost-efficient applications. Also leads engineering teams and delivers Databricks and Microsoft training so client teams can run the platform themselves. Available on a contract basis through Instrovate, remote or on-site, subject to availability.
Where this consultant helps
- Embedding with client teams to scope use cases and ship to production
- Generative AI on Databricks: Genie and text-to-SQL analytics, RAG, agent serving
- Foundation model connectivity through AI Gateway (including Claude via Amazon Bedrock) with rate limits, usage tracking and guardrails
- Enterprise AI security: Unity Catalog permissions, endpoint access controls, OAuth and on-behalf-of identity
- Lakehouse engineering: Delta Lake, PySpark, streaming, data quality and validation
- Production readiness: deployment automation, load testing, latency tuning, capacity planning and cost optimisation
- Databricks Apps with React, Streamlit and FastAPI
- CI/CD for Databricks
- Team leadership, stakeholder management and platform training
Skills
AI and serving
- Databricks AI Gateway
- Model Serving
- Genie
- Mosaic AI Agent Framework
- Foundation models
- MLflow tracing and evaluation
- RAG
- Vector Search
- LangGraph
- Semantic caching
Data and governance
- Unity Catalog
- System tables
- Delta Lake
- Databricks Workflows
- PySpark
- Spark SQL
- Streaming
- Data quality
Applications
- Databricks Apps
- Python
- React
- Streamlit
- FastAPI
- REST APIs
Cloud and DevOps
- AWS
- Azure
- Jenkins CI/CD
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Git
Security
- OAuth
- On-behalf-of identity
- Endpoint access controls
- Unity Catalog permissions
Testing and performance
- Load testing
- End-to-end testing
- MLflow traces
Industries
- Consumer brands
- Manufacturing
- Life sciences
Typical engagements
- Embedded forward deployed engineer on a Databricks GenAI programme
- Genie and text-to-SQL rollout
- AI platform security and governance review
- Prototype-to-production hardening
- Team enablement and training
How to engage
Contracts are signed with Instrovate Technologies L.L.C, which places the consultant with you. Share your requirement and we will confirm fit, availability and terms.
Available on a contract basis through Instrovate, remote or on-site, subject to availability.
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Consultant profile: FDE-001