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Platform Staffing Group (an STA Group Company) is looking for a Sr. Principal Software Architect to assist our client in leading the development and evolution of our Data & ML Platform using Databricks as the foundational technology.

Remote - candidate can be considered remote if currently lives in the US and lives more than 50 miles from Johnston, IA location. Johnston, IA – candidate living within 50-mile radius of location required onsite T/W/TH each week.

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES

This individual will lead the development and evolution of our client’s Data & ML Platform using Databricks as the foundational technology. This role focuses on building platform capabilities that enable federated domain teams across R&D to efficiently build, operate, and manage their own data and AI products. This includes working closely with data professionals to understand friction points and develop platform features, patterns, and enablement pathways that improve productivity, governance, and adoption. This work directly supports a federated data mesh strategy and is expected to grow over multiple years.

Develop and enhance Databricks-based platform capabilities to improve the productivity, governance, and autonomy of federated domain teams.

Collaborate with Data Platform and ML Platform leadership to align platform features to strategic roadmap and domain enablement needs.

Act as a technical and architectural advisor to teams onboarding to the platform, helping them apply best practices rather than building their solutions for them.

Identify friction points experienced by data engineers, data scientists, and analysts, and translate them into platform features, reusable patterns, and enablement artifacts.

Work across federated data domains to ensure platform consistency, governance alignment, and scalable adoption aligned with data mesh principles.

Provide technical leadership while still being capable of hands-on development when shaping reference implementations, IaC modules, or platform accelerators.

Advocate for secure-by-default design, applying modern security principles and working knowledge of cyber practices in a cloud-native platform context.

Contribute to FinOps-aware decision-making by communicating trade-offs between different Databricks implementation patterns (clusters vs. serverless vs. SQL warehouses, Unity Catalog configuration, etc.).

Required Skills

7+ years of technical leadership with data or platform engineering roles preferred

Experience or deep understanding of designing or enabling federated data/ML environments where teams self-serve platform capabilities.

Strong understanding of platform architecture and patterns that support data mesh or domain-oriented enablement.

Ability to think in terms of platform products including prioritizing reusable capabilities, reducing cognitive load for users, and avoiding central engineering bottlenecks.

Experience influencing architecture decisions and guiding teams through platform-aligned adoption pathways.

Knowledge of/or expertise with Databricks as a platform beyond notebook usage, including governance, workspace design, multi-domain enablement, and Unity Catalog patterns.

Nice to Have Skills

Hands-on familiarity with Terraform, AWS infrastructure concepts (IAM, S3, networking), and IaC workflows.

Platform mindset with experience building internal platform products with developer experience and scale in mind.

General knowledge of cybersecurity and secure-by-default design patterns in cloud platforms.

Awareness of FinOps principles and cost optimization patterns specific to Databricks (e.g., cluster policy trade-offs, compute model selection, multi-workspace vs multi-catalog trade-offs).

Experience working within a federated data governance or data mesh operating model.

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