Job Title: AWS Databricks Platform Administrator
Location: Raritan, NJ (On-site)
Employment Type: Contract (W2 through ZipStaff — No C2C or 1099)
About the Opportunity:
ZipStaff is seeking an experienced AWS Databricks Platform Administrator to own platform reliability, governance, security, cost management, and operational excellence for a global technology services firm.
This senior role requires substantial hands-on expertise administering, securing, optimizing, and supporting Databricks on AWS for enterprise data and analytics workloads. You will design scalable platform architecture, enforce standards, automate operations, and provide technical leadership while partnering with data engineering, analytics, security, and cloud teams.
What You’ll Do:
- Administer and support Databricks accounts, workspaces, Unity Catalog, metastores, clusters, SQL warehouses, jobs, instance pools, repositories, libraries, secrets, and access controls on AWS.
- Design and maintain secure, scalable, and highly available Databricks platform architecture aligned with enterprise cloud standards.
- Manage identity and access through IAM roles and policies, service principals, single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, and role-based access control.
- Implement data governance using Unity Catalog including catalogs, schemas, external locations, storage credentials, privileges, lineage, and auditability.
- Configure and troubleshoot AWS integrations such as S3, IAM, VPC, PrivateLink, KMS, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Route 53, and Secrets Manager.
- Establish cluster policies, approved runtime standards, library controls, tagging, auto-termination, serverless usage guidelines, and workload isolation.
- Monitor platform health, performance, job reliability, capacity, and usage; proactively identify and resolve bottlenecks and recurring issues.
- Drive FinOps practices by analyzing DBU and AWS consumption, enforcing tagging and budgets, optimizing compute configurations, and reducing idle or inefficient resources.
- Automate workspace provisioning, configuration, policy enforcement, and operational tasks using Terraform, Databricks Asset Bundles, Databricks CLI/SDK, Python, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Lead incident, problem, change, release, vulnerability, and service-request management while meeting agreed SLAs and operational KPIs.
- Plan and execute runtime upgrades, platform migrations, disaster-recovery tests, backup validation, and business-continuity activities.
- Partner with data engineering, analytics, security, networking, cloud engineering, and application teams to onboard workloads and resolve complex technical issues.
- Maintain architecture diagrams, runbooks, standard operating procedures, support documentation, compliance evidence, and knowledge articles.
- Provide technical leadership, mentor administrators and engineers, conduct reviews, and define platform standards and product roadmaps.
- Coordinate with Databricks and AWS support teams for critical incidents, product defects, and service improvements.
Required Qualifications:
- 9+ years of overall experience in cloud infrastructure, data platforms, DevOps, platform engineering, or production administration.
- 5+ years of hands-on Databricks administration experience, preferably with enterprise deployments on AWS.
- Strong experience with Databricks account console, workspace administration, Unity Catalog, cluster policies, SQL warehouses, jobs, Delta Lake, system tables, and audit logs.
- Strong knowledge of AWS networking, security, storage, encryption, monitoring, and identity services (VPC, S3, IAM, KMS, PrivateLink, CloudWatch, CloudTrail).
- Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code and automation using Terraform, Python, shell scripting, REST APIs, Databricks CLI/SDK, and CI/CD tools.
- Proven experience supporting business-critical platforms in production, including incident response, root-cause analysis, change management, capacity planning, and SLA governance.
- Working knowledge of Linux administration, networking, DNS, firewalls, certificates, proxies, and secure connectivity patterns.
- Good understanding of Spark architecture, Delta Lake, workload performance, data lakehouse patterns, and troubleshooting distributed data workloads.
- Experience implementing security controls including least-privilege access, secrets management, encryption, audit logging, vulnerability remediation, and compliance requirements.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent relevant experience.
- Ability to work on-site in Raritan, NJ.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with Redshift or related AWS analytics services.
- Prior leadership mentoring administrators or defining platform standards and roadmaps.
- Background supporting large-scale enterprise data and analytics platforms in a technology services environment.
Benefits:
- Health Insurance.
- Dental Insurance.
- Vision Insurance.
- 401(k) + 401(k) matching.
- Paid time off.
- Referral Program.
About ZipStaff:
ZipStaff partners with leading organizations to connect skilled technology professionals with high-impact contract opportunities. We focus on quality matches, clear communication, and long-term success for candidates and clients.
To apply, submit your resume highlighting your AWS Databricks platform administration, Unity Catalog governance, Terraform automation, and production support experience. Pure research or junior experience will not be considered.