Senior AI/ML Architect at Databricks - Career Growth Role in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
Career Trajectory: This is a senior individual contributor / technical leadership role at one of the most influential data-and-AI companies globally. Databricks' platform (Lakehouse, MLflow, Unity Catalog, Agent Bricks) is deeply embedded in enterprise ML stacks, so hands-on experience here is highly transferable and résumé-defining in the AI/ML market.
Skills Development: The role sits at the cutting edge of applied AI — GenAI, RAG architectures, agentic systems, and MLOps. These are among the highest-demand skills in the 2024-2025 job market, commanding strong premiums. You'll also develop go-to-market, pre-sales influence, and cross-functional product collaboration skills that open doors to Principal/Staff Engineer, AI Product Manager, or Director of Engineering paths.
Compensation Benchmarks: Although no salary is listed, Databricks SSA roles in the U.S. typically range from $180K–$260K+ OTE (base + variable). Brazil-based roles will reflect local market rates, which are lower in USD terms but competitive locally. Databricks is a late-stage unicorn with significant equity value — RSUs may be meaningful upside.
Green Flags:
- Databricks serves 70% of the Fortune 500 — massive enterprise exposure.
- Strong thought leadership and mentorship component accelerates your personal brand.
- Cross-functional influence over the product roadmap is rare at this level.
Red Flags to Consider:
- Up to 30% travel may affect work-life balance.
- Pre-sales/post-sales environments can be high-pressure with quarterly targets.
- Export-control compliance clause suggests some bureaucratic overhead.
AI/ML Specialist Solutions Architect (SSA) — Ref: P-226
As an AI/ML Specialist Solutions Architect (SSA), you will be the trusted technical ML & AI expert to both Databricks customers and the Field Engineering organization. You will work with Solution Architects to guide customers in architecting production-grade ML & AI applications on Databricks, while aligning their technical roadmap with the continually evolving Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. You will continue to strengthen your technical skills through applying cutting-edge technologies in GenAI, MLOps, and ML more broadly, expanding your impact through mentorship, and establishing yourself as an AI thought leader. This role can be remote.
The Impact You Will Have:
- Architect production-level ML & AI workloads for customers using our unified platform, including agents, end-to-end ML pipelines, training/inference optimization, integration with cloud-native services, MLOps, etc.
- Serve as a trusted practitioner for enterprise GenAI solutions, including RAG architectures, agentic systems (tool-calling agents, multi-agent orchestration, guardrails), natural language querying of structured data, AI evaluation and observability, and monitoring systems.
- Build, scale, and optimize customer AI workloads and apply best-in-class MLOps to productionize these workloads across a variety of domains.
- Provide advanced technical support to Solution Architects during the technical sale, ranging from feature engineering, training, tracking, serving, to model monitoring, all within a single platform, as well as participating in the larger ML SME community at Databricks.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with product and engineering teams to represent the voice of the customer, define priorities, and influence the product roadmap, helping drive adoption of Databricks' AI offerings.
What We Look For:
- 5+ years of hands-on industry ML experience in at least one of the following:
- ML Engineer: Build and maintain production-grade cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) infrastructure that supports the deployment of ML applications, including drift monitoring.
- AI Engineer: Experience with the latest techniques in LLMs & agentic systems, including vector databases, fine-tuning LLMs, AI guardrail systems, and deploying LLMs with tools such as HuggingFace, LangChain, and OpenAI.
- 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 both non-technical and technical audiences.
- Passion for collaboration, life-long learning, and driving business value through ML & AI.
- [Preferred] 2+ years of customer-facing experience in a pre-sales or post-sales role.
- Ability to meet expectations for technical training and role-specific outcomes within 3 months of hire.
- Ability to travel up to 30% when needed.
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.
Benefits
At 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this Databricks AI/ML Solutions Architect role fully remote?
What ML experience is required for this position?
Is prior customer-facing or pre-sales experience required?
What technologies will I work with in this role?
Is this role based in Brazil?
