AWS Databricks Platform Administrator

Job Title: AWS Databricks Platform Administrator

Location: Raritan, NJ (On-site)

Employment Type: Contract (W2 through Zip Staff — No C2C or 1099)

Zip Staff is seeking an experienced AWS Databricks Platform Administrator to own platform reliability, governance, security, cost management, and operational excellence for a global technology services firm.

This senior role requires substantial hands‑on expertise administering, securing, optimizing, and supporting Databricks on AWS for enterprise data and analytics workloads. You will design scalable platform architecture, enforce standards, automate operations, and provide technical leadership while partnering with data engineering, analytics, security, and cloud teams.

• Administer and support Databricks accounts, work spaces, Unity Catalog, metastores, clusters, SQL warehouses, jobs, instance pools, repositories, libraries, secrets, and access controls on AWS.
• Design and maintain secure, scalable, and highly available Databricks platform architecture aligned with enterprise cloud standards.
• Manage identity and access through IAM roles and policies, service principals, single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, and role-based access control.
• Implement data governance using Unity Catalog including catalogs, schemas, external locations, storage credentials, privileges, lineage, and auditability.
• Configure and troubleshoot AWS integrations such as S3, IAM, VPC, Private Link, KMS, Cloud Watch, Cloud Trail, Route 53, and Secrets Manager.
• Establish cluster policies, approved runtime standards, library controls, tagging, auto-termination, serverless usage guidelines, and workload isolation.
• Monitor platform health, performance, job reliability, capacity, and usage; proactively identify and resolve bottlenecks and recurring issues.
• Drive Fin Ops practices by analyzing DBU and AWS consumption, enforcing tagging and budgets, optimizing compute configurations, and reducing idle or inefficient resources.
• Automate workspace provisioning, configuration, policy enforcement, and operational tasks using Terraform, Databricks Asset Bundles, Databricks CLI/SDK, Python, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Lead incident, problem, change, release, vulnerability, and service-request management while meeting agreed SLAs and operational KPIs.
• Plan and execute runtime upgrades, platform migrations, disaster-recovery tests, backup validation, and business‑continuity activities.
• Partner with data engineering, analytics, security, networking, cloud engineering, and application teams to onboard workloads and resolve complex technical issues.
• Maintain architecture diagrams, runbooks, standard operating procedures, support documentation, compliance evidence, and knowledge articles.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor administrators and engineers, conduct reviews, and define platform standards and product roadmaps.
• Coordinate with Databricks and AWS support teams for critical incidents, product defects, and service improvements.

• 9+ years of overall experience in cloud infrastructure, data platforms, Dev Ops, platform engineering, or production administration.
• 5+ years of hands‑on Databricks administration experience, preferably with enterprise deployments on AWS.
• Strong experience with Databricks account console, workspace administration, Unity Catalog, cluster policies, SQL warehouses, jobs, Delta Lake, system tables, and audit logs.
• Strong knowledge of AWS networking, security, storage, encryption, monitoring, and identity services (VPC, S3, IAM, KMS, Private Link, Cloud Watch, Cloud Trail).
• Hands‑on experience with infrastructure as code and automation using Terraform, Python, shell scripting, REST APIs, Databricks CLI/SDK, and CI/CD tools.
• Proven…