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.