Senior Azure & Databricks Contractor Insurance Data Platform Engagement

Role: Senior Azure & Databricks Contractor — Insurance Data Platform Engagement
Location: Remote 
Duration: 6+ months 
Pay rate: $57/hr. on W2

Engagement Overview
Client is building a net-new data foundation for a major insurance client, covering Policy, Claims, and Rating data across a modern medallion lakehouse architecture. This role will play a central part in both the platform-specific build and the client-facing architecture conversations already underway. The client currently runs on a legacy Cloudera/Hadoop environment, and a core objective of this engagement is building net-new — coexisting with, but not creating new dependencies on, that legacy platform.

Key Responsibilities

Serve as the primary hands-on Azure and Databricks technical expert for the engagement
Own Databricks-specific architecture decisions — workspace design, Unity Catalog governance strategy, and compute/cluster architecture — not just build within an existing design
Work directly with the client's Enterprise Data Architect and infrastructure team on both platform-agnostic and platform-specific architecture decisions
Provide technical leadership and mentorship to the offshore delivery team
Coordinate delivery execution between client-facing architecture discussions (onshore) and day-to-day build/engineering work (offshore), ensuring nothing gets lost in translation between the two
Support design and implementation of a medallion lakehouse architecture using modern open table formats
Help navigate coexistence with the client's legacy Cloudera environment during the platform transition, without introducing new legacy dependencies
Support evaluation and adoption of accelerator tooling (AI-assisted development tools, DBT for metric/data product development)
Participate directly in client architecture review sessions, representing Client's technical position with credibility
Act as a fast escalation point for complex Azure/Databricks technical issues blocking the broader team

Required Qualifications

8+ years overall in data engineering/architecture, with 4-5+ years hands-on specifically with Azure and Databricks
Prior experience specifically in a Databricks Architect role — designing enterprise-scale Databricks solutions, not solely implementation/engineering work
Strong, hands-on production experience with Azure data services — ADLS Gen2, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse/Fabric
Strong, hands-on production experience with Databricks — Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, PySpark, Databricks Workflows; familiarity with Managed Iceberg tables a plus
Proven experience designing and implementing medallion/lakehouse architectures at enterprise scale
Experience migrating from legacy Hadoop/Cloudera environments to modern cloud-native platforms
Strong client-facing communication skills. Comfortable presenting and defending architecture recommendations directly to client stakeholders, not just working behind the scenes
Experience mentoring and technically leading distributed/offshore engineering teams
Ability to work independently and drive technical decisions with limited day-to-day oversight

Preferred Qualifications

Insurance/P&C domain experience, particularly familiarity with policy administration systems
Experience with DBT for data product/metric development
Hands-on experience with Apache Iceberg specifically (not just Delta Lake)
Knowledge of Claude Code and/or GitHub Copilot is an added benefit
Prior consulting/professional services delivery experience
Familiarity with data governance/catalog tooling (Unity Catalog)
Current Databricks architect-level or professional-level certification (to be confirmed against Databricks' current certification catalog)