AI Engineer – FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer)

Remote from: UK
Annual salary: Undisclosed
Salary information is not provided for this position. Check our Salary Directory to estimate the average compensation for similar roles.
Department: Software Engineering
Employment type: Full Time,
Job posted: 17 May 2026
Apply before: 17 Jun 2026
Experience level: Senior
Views / Applies: 20 / 6

All your data, analytics and AI on one lakehouse platform

Computer Software
2013

AI Summary

Databricks is hiring an AI Engineer for their Forward Deployed Engineering team, which delivers professional services to help customers build and productionize cutting-edge AI applications. The role involves developing GenAI solutions, owning production rollouts, and serving as a trusted technical advisor. Ideal candidates have experience with GenAI tools like HuggingFace and LangChain, production ML deployments on cloud platforms, and strong communication skills. The position is open to remote locations and requires a graduate degree or equivalent experience. Databricks offers comprehensive benefits and is committed to diversity and inclusion.

Job Complexity

Easy Hard

AI Insight The role requires a high level of expertise in GenAI, production deployments, and customer-facing skills, making it challenging. However, it is open to all levels, suggesting some flexibility.

Salary Analysis

AI Insight The salary for this role is not explicitly provided, but based on market data for AI Engineer roles at companies like Databricks, the estimated median is around $180,000. This is competitive for the industry and reflects the high demand for GenAI expertise.

Key Skills

GenAI LLMOps RAG HuggingFace LangChain PyTorch AWS Azure Apache Spark Data Science

Cover Letter Sample

Dear Hiring Manager,

I am excited to apply for the AI Engineer - FDE position at Databricks. With a strong background in building and deploying GenAI applications, including RAG and multi-agent systems, I am confident in my ability to drive impactful solutions for your customers. My experience with tools like HuggingFace, LangChain, and cloud platforms aligns perfectly with the requirements of this role.

I am particularly drawn to Databricks' mission to unify data, analytics, and AI, and I am eager to contribute to cutting-edge projects while collaborating with a talented team. I thrive in customer-facing roles and enjoy translating complex technical concepts into actionable insights.

Thank you for considering my application. I look forward to the opportunity to discuss how I can add value to your team.

Sincerely,
[Your Name]

Possible Interview Questions

Can you describe a GenAI application you built and productionized? What challenges did you face?

I built a RAG-based customer support chatbot using LangChain and deployed it on AWS. Challenges included latency optimization, handling diverse query formats, and ensuring data privacy. I addressed these by implementing caching, fine-tuning the retriever, and using encrypted storage.

How do you evaluate and improve the performance of a GenAI model in production?

I use a combination of automated metrics like BLEU and ROUGE, along with human evaluation. I also monitor drift and user feedback to iteratively fine-tune the model or adjust the prompt engineering.

Explain your experience with multi-agent systems in AI. Give an example.

I worked on a multi-agent system for automated code review, where agents specialized in different aspects like syntax, security, and performance. They collaborated via a shared memory and a coordinator agent to produce comprehensive reviews.

How do you handle customer objections or technical limitations when implementing AI solutions?

I listen to their concerns, explain trade-offs clearly, and propose alternative approaches. For example, when a customer wanted real-time inference but had latency constraints, I suggested a hybrid model with offline batch processing for non-critical tasks.

Describe a time you had to teach a non-technical stakeholder about a complex AI concept.

I once explained the concept of embeddings to a marketing team by using an analogy of a map where similar items are close together. I then demonstrated with a simple visualization to show how we cluster customer segments.

AI Engineer – FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer) (ALL LEVELS)

Mission

The AI Forward Deployed Engineering (AI FDE) team is a highly specialized customer-facing AI team at Databricks. We deliver professional services engagements to help our customers build and productionize first-of-its-kind AI applications. 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 GenAI, LLMOps, and ML more broadly. Open to remote locations.

The impact you will have:

Develop cutting-edge GenAI solutions, incorporating the latest techniques from Databricks AI research to solve customer problems
Own production rollouts of consumer and internally facing GenAI applications
Serve as a trusted technical advisor to customers across a variety of domains
Present at conferences such as Data + AI Summit, recognized as a thought leader internally and externally
Collaborate cross-functionally with the product and engineering teams to influence priorities and shape the product roadmap

What we look for:

Experience building GenAI applications, including RAG, multi-agent systems, Text2SQL, fine-tuning, etc., with tools such as HuggingFace, LangChain, and DSPy
Expertise in deploying production-grade GenAI applications, including evaluation and optimizations
Extensive years of hands-on industry data science experience, leveraging common machine learning and data science tools, i.e. pandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch, etc.
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 AI
[Preferred] Experience using the Databricks Intelligence Platform and Apache Spark™ to process large-scale distributed datasets

About Databricks

Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 10,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, Grammarly, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify and democratize data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
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.

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