AI Engineer - Forward Deployed Engineering (AI FDE)
Posted 4 days ago
The role in short
Develop and productionize LLM-based solutions and ML pipelines for customers while advising on architecture and best practices.
Mission
The Machine Learning (ML) Practice team is a highly specialized customer-facing ML team at Databricks facing an increasing demand for Large Language Model (LLM)-based solutions. We deliver professional services engagements to help our customers build, scale, and optimize ML pipelines, as well as put those pipelines into production. We work cross-functionally to shape long-term strategic priorities and initiatives alongside engineering, product, and developer relations, as well as support internal subject matter expert (SME) teams. We view our team as an ensemble: we look for individuals with strong, unique specializations to improve the overall strength of the team. This team is the right fit for you if you love working with customers, teammates, and fueling your curiosity for the latest trends in LLMs, MLOps, and ML more broadly. This role can be remote.
The impact you will have:
Develop LLM solutions on customer data such as RAG architectures on enterprise knowledge repos, querying structured data with natural language, and content generation
Build, scale, and optimize customer data science workloads and apply best in class MLOps to productionize these workloads across a variety of domains
Advise data teams on various data science such as architecture, tooling, and best practices
Present at conferences such as Data+AI Summit
Provide technical mentorship to the larger ML SME community in Databricks
Collaborate cross-functionally with the product and engineering teams to define priorities and influence the product roadmap
What we look for:
- Experience building Generative AI applications, including RAG, agents, text2sql, fine-tuning, and deploying LLMs, with tools such as HuggingFace, Langchain, and OpenAI
- 5+ years of hands-on industry data science experience, leveraging typical machine learning and data science tools including pandas, scikit-learn, and TensorFlow/PyTorch
- Experience building production-grade machine learning deployments on AWS, Azure, or GCP
- Graduate degree in a quantitative discipline (Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, Operations Research, etc.) or equivalent practical experience
- Experience communicating and/or teaching technical concepts to non-technical and technical audiences alike
- Passion for collaboration, life-long learning, and driving business value through ML
- [Preferred] Experience working with Databricks & Apache Spark to process large-scale distributed datasets
About Databricks
Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 20,000 organizations worldwide — including adidas, AT&T, Bayer, Block, Mastercard, Rivian, Unilever, and 70% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data + AI Platform to build and scale data and AI apps, analytics and agents. Headquartered in San Francisco with 30+ offices around the globe, Databricks offers a unified platform that includes Genie, Lakebase, Agent Bricks, Lakeflow, Lakehouse, and Unity Catalog. To learn more, follow Databricks on LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and Instagram.
BenefitsAt Databricks, we strive to provide comprehensive benefits and perks that meet the needs of all of our employees. For specific details on the benefits offered in your region click here.
Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
At Databricks, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can excel. We take great care to ensure that our hiring practices are inclusive and meet equal employment opportunity standards. Individuals looking for employment at Databricks are considered without regard to age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other protected characteristics.
Compliance
If access to export-controlled technology or source code is required for performance of job duties, it is within Employer's discretion whether to apply for a U.S. government license for such positions, and Employer may decline to proceed with an applicant on this basis alone.
Prep for this interview
2 questions likely to come up at Databricks, each matched to a line in this posting.
- 1LLMs, RAG and agents
They wrote: “Experience building Generative AI applications, including RAG, agents, text2sql, fine-tuning, and deploying LLMs, with tools such as HuggingFace, Langchain, and OpenAI”
A customer wants a chatbot over their internal documents. How do you build it?
How to answer
Why they ask: RAG is the most common first project. They want the whole path, from messy files to answers people trust.
- Collect and clean the documents; handle permissions per user
- Split them into chunks, embed, and store with source links
- Retrieve, then answer with citations; say “I don't know” when retrieval is weak
- Build a test set of real questions with expected answers before launch
Tip: Spend more time on the data and on testing than on the model.
- 2Cloud, deployment and security
They wrote: “Experience building production-grade machine learning deployments on AWS, Azure, or GCP”
How would you debug a deployment that works in staging but fails at the customer's site?
How to answer
Why they ask: Customer environments differ in ways you can't see. This tests method under pressure.
- Compare versions, config and environment variables
- Check network rules, proxies and certificates (common in enterprise)
- Look at resource limits and permissions
- Add the missing check to your install steps afterwards
Tip: List the usual suspects and how you'd check each without full access.
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