Sr. Databricks Solutions Architect

Candidates should have some kind of Healthcare background and please mention 2 managerial references in the CV.

Job Title: Sr. Databricks Solutions Architect

Job Location: Must be able to come to the office when needed - Washington, DC (Candidate must be in the DMV area)

Length: Contract to Hire

Start Date: January 19th or January 12

Pay Rate: $50/hour C2C

Conversion Salary: Up to $170K

Background: Standard background check required

Work Auth: US Citizen, Green Card ONLY

Top Skills Needed:

• Deep hands-on expertise with Databricks platform architecture and governance
• Unity Catalog, workspaces, external locations, compute, access controls, cluster governance.
• Reliability engineering, monitoring, and operational hardening of the Lakehouse
• Observability, alerting, DR readiness, backup/restore, performance tuning, incident response.
• Strong experience with ADF, CI/CD, and Terraform for orchestrating and managing the Lakehouse
• Pipeline orchestration, IaC, DevOps, environment promotion, compute policies.

Typical Day-to-Day:

• Design how the Databricks Lakehouse should work including the structure, tools, standards, and best practices
• Guide engineering teams on how to build pipelines and use Databricks correctly
• Solve technical issues when data jobs fail or performance slows
• Work with stakeholders to understand data needs and deliver solutions
• Set standards for security, governance, naming conventions, and architecture
• Ensure the Databricks platform is stable, reliable, and always available
• Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, logging, and health dashboards
• Strengthen and fix ingestion pipelines (ADF ? landing ? raw ? curated)
• Improve data quality checks, anomaly detection, and pipeline reliability
• Manage CI/CD pipelines and deployment processes using Azure DevOps or GitHub
• Use Terraform (IaC) to deploy and manage Databricks and Azure infrastructure
• Partner with Security and FinOps on access controls, compliance, and cost governance
• Mentor the Data Engineer and support distributed data engineering teams across the organization

Key Responsibilities

1. Lakehouse Architecture & Platform Administration

(Approximately 60% of role when combined with mentoring & code review)

• Serve as the primary architect and administrator for the Azure Databricks Lakehouse (Unity Catalog, workspaces, external locations, compute, access controls).
• Lead execution of a Minimal Viable Hardening Roadmap for the platform, prioritizing:
• High availability and DR readiness
• Backup/restore patterns for data and metadata
• Platform observability and operational metrics
• Secure and maintainable catalog/namespace structure
• Robust and proactive data quality assurance
• Implement and evolve naming conventions, environment strategies, and platform standards that enable long-term maintainability and safe scaling.
• Act as the Lakehouse-facing counterpart to Enterprise Architecture and Security, collaborating on network architecture, identity & access, compliance controls, and platform guardrails.

2. Reliability, Monitoring, and Incident Management

• Design, implement, and maintain comprehensive monitoring and alerting for Lakehouse platform components, ingestion jobs, key data assets, and system health indicators.
• Oversee end-to-end reliability engineering, including capacity planning, throughput tuning, job performance optimization, and preventative maintenance (e.g., IR updates, compute policy reviews).
• Participate in — and help shape — the on-call rotation for high-priority incidents affecting production workloads, including rapid diagnosis and mitigation during off-hours as needed.
• Develop and maintain incident response runbooks, escalation pathways, stakeholder communication protocols, and operational readiness checklists.
• Lead or participate in post-incident Root Cause Analyses, ensuring durable remediation and preventing recurrence.
• Conduct periodic DR and failover simulations, validating RPO/RTO and documenting improvements.

This role is foundational to ensuring 24/7/365 availability and timely delivery of mission-critical data for clinical, financial, operational, and analytical needs.

3. Pipeline Reliability, Ingestion Patterns & Data Quality

• Strengthen and standardize ingestion pipelines (ADF ? landing ? raw ? curated), including watermarking, incremental logic, backfills, and retry/cancel/resume patterns.
• Collaborate with the Data Engineer to modernize logging, automated anomaly detection, pipeline health dashboards, and DQ validation automation.
• Provide architectural guidance, code reviews, mentoring, and best-practice patterns to distributed engineering teams across MedStar.
• Support stabilization of existing ingestion and transformation pipelines across clinical (notes, OHDSI), financial, operational, and quality use cases.

4. DevOps, CI/CD, and Infrastructure as Code

• Administer and improve CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps or GitHub Enterprise.
• Support automated testing, environment promotion, and rollback patterns for Databricks and dbt assets.
• Maintain and extend Terraform (or adopt Terraform from another IaC background) for Databricks, storage, networking, compute policies, and related infrastructure.
• Promote version control standards, branching strategies, and deployment governance across data engineering teams.

5. Security, FinOps, and Guardrails Partnership

• Partner with Enterprise Architecture and Security on platform access controls, identity strategy, encryption, networking, and compliance.
• Implement and enforce cost tagging, compute policies, and alerts supporting FinOps transparency and cost governance.
• Collaborate with the team defining agentic coding guardrails, ensuring the Lakehouse platform supports safe & compliant use of AI-assisted code generation and execution.
• Help assess and optimize serverless SQL, serverless Python, and job compute patterns for cost-efficiency and reliability.

6. Mentorship, Collaboration, & Distributed Enablement

• Mentor the mid-level Data Engineer on Databricks, ADF, dbt, observability, DevOps, Terraform, and operational engineering patterns.
• Provide guidance, design patterns, and code review support to multiple distributed data engineering teams (Finance, MCPI, Safety/Risk, Quality, Digital Transformation, etc.).
• Lead platform knowledge-sharing efforts through documentation, workshops, and best-practice guidance.
• Demonstrate strong collaboration skills, balancing independence with alignment across teams.

7. Optional / Nice-to-Have: OHDSI Platform Support

(Not required for hiring; can be learned on the job.)

• Assist with or support operational administration of the OHDSI/OMOP stack (Atlas, WebAPI, vocabularies, Kubernetes deployments).
• Collaborate with partners to ensure the OHDSI platform is secure, maintainable, and well-integrated with the Lakehouse.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years in cloud data engineering, platform engineering, or solution architecture.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Azure Databricks:
• Unity Catalog
• Workspaces & external locations
• SQL/Python notebooks & Jobs
• Cluster/warehouse governance
• Solid working experience with Azure Data Factory (pipelines, IRs, linked services).
• Strong SQL and Python engineering skills.
• Experience with CI/CD in Azure DevOps or GitHub Enterprise.
• Experience with Terraform or another IaC framework, and willingness to adopt Terraform.
• Demonstrated ability to design or support monitoring, alerting, logging, or reliability systems.
• Strong communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.

Preferred Qualifications (Optional)

• Advanced Terraform experience.
• Familiarity with healthcare, HIPAA, PHI, or regulated environments.
• Experience with Purview or enterprise cataloging.
• Exposure to OHDSI/OMOP.
• Experience optimizing or refactoring legacy ingestion pipelines.
• Experience supporting secure, controlled AI/agentic execution environments.
• Experience with EPIC EHR data exchange and/or EPIC Caboodle or Cogito analytics suite.

Personal Attributes

• Hands-on, pragmatic, and operationally minded.
• Comfortable leading both architecture and implementation.
• Collaborative and mentorship-oriented; thrives in small core teams with broad influence.
• Values platform stability, observability, and hardening over shiny features.
• Curious and adaptable, especially with emerging AI-assisted engineering patterns.
• Ability to remain calm and effective during incidents and high-pressure situations

Job Type: Contract

Pay: $ $50.00 per hour

Expected hours: 8 per week

Work Location: On the road