Databricks Administrator / Platform Engineer

About the role

The role is responsible for core platform administration across workspaces, Unity Catalog, access controls, storage integrations, compute governance, and secure platform operations. It also serves as a technical advisor to governance, FinOps, and engineering stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Administer and maintain Databricks workspaces, catalogs, schemas, storage integrations, permissions, and platform configurations.
• Manage Unity Catalog structures, including catalogs, schemas, external locations, storage credentials, grants, metadata standards, and governance controls.
• Support user provisioning, group membership, RBAC/ABAC models, service principals, secrets management, and secure access patterns across the platform.
• Define and enforce operational standards for cluster policies, compute governance, runtime management, workspace security, and scalable platform usage.
• Troubleshoot platform issues related to permissions, connectivity, compute usage, storage access, workspace administration, and job execution.
• Contribute data engineering expertise to platform best practices, including ingestion, transformation, orchestration, data quality, and performance optimization patterns.
• Advise governance teams on standards for curated data products, metadata, tagging, lineage, and data quality expectations.
• Partner with security, cloud, and engineering teams to improve monitoring, auditability, policy enforcement, and administrative guardrails.
• Support cost optimization efforts by recommending best practices for workload management, cluster sizing, autoscaling, scheduling, and efficient resource usage.
• Participate in platform design discussions, architecture reviews, and operational planning to improve scalability, maintainability, and governance maturity.
• Create and maintain documentation, standards, runbooks, and repeatable operating procedures for platform administration and governed delivery.
• As needed, provide platform-level guidance for adjacent analytics and AI capabilities in alignment with governance and operational standards.

Requirements

• Technical training/certification(s) and 5+ years of Databricks administration, platform engineering, or data engineering operations.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience administering Databricks in an enterprise environment.
• Strong experience with Unity Catalog, workspace administration, permissions management, user/group access controls, and storage integrations.
• Practical data engineering experience using SQL, Python, PySpark, or Spark in support of pipeline troubleshooting, platform standards, and engineering collaboration.
• Strong understanding of Databricks security best practices, including RBAC, ABAC, least privilege, cluster policies, secrets management, and secure workspace configuration.
• Experience supporting governance initiatives such as metadata management, tagging, lineage, access policies, or data quality standards.
• Familiarity with AWS, Azure, or multi-cloud Databricks environments.
• Experience balancing hands-on administrative responsibilities with strategic advisory work on platform design, policies, and best practices.

Qualifications

• Public Trust clearance required.

Skills

• Databricks Platform
• Databricks Unity Catalog
• Data Engineering
• Structured Query Language (SQL) Development

Benefits

This role is fully remote!

Pay

The likely salary range for this position is $113,900 - $154,100. This is not, however, a guarantee of compensation or salary. Rather, salary will be set based on experience, geographic location and possibly contractual requirements and could fall outside of this range.

Schedule

Scheduled Weekly Hours: 40

Telecommuting Options

Telecommuting Options: Remote Work

Additional Work Locations

Total Rewards At GDIT: Our benefits package for all US-based employees includes a variety of medical plan options, some with Health Savings Accounts, dental plan options, a vision plan, and a 401(k) plan offering the ability to contribute both pre and post-tax dollars up to the IRS annual limits and receive a company match. To encourage work/life balance, GDIT offers employees full flex work weeks where possible and a variety of paid time off plans, including vacation, sick and personal time, holidays, paid parental, military, bereavement and jury duty leave. GDIT typically provides new employees with 15 days of paid leave per calendar year to be used for vacations, personal business, and illness and an additional 10 paid holidays per year. Paid leave and paid holidays are prorated based on the employee’s date of hire. The GDIT Paid Family Leave program provides a total of up to 160 hours of paid leave in a rolling 12 month period for eligible employees. To ensure our employees are able to protect their income, other offerings such as short and long-term disability benefits, life, accidental death and dismemberment, personal accident, critical illness and business travel and accident insurance are provided or available. We regularly review our Total Rewards package to ensure our offerings are competitive and reflect what our employees have told us they value most.

About Our Work

We are GDIT. A global technology and professional services company that delivers technology solutions and mission services to every major agency across the U.S. government, defense and intelligence community. Our 26,000 experts extract the power of technology to create immediate value and deliver solutions at the edge of innovation. We operate across 50+ countries worldwide, offering leading mission-ready capabilities in AI, cloud, cyber and software development. Join our Talent Community to stay up to date on our career opportunities and events at gdit.com/tc.

Equal Opportunity Employer

GDIT is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.