You don't need another "Spark developer" who runs one fat notebook on an all-purpose cluster. You need a Databricks engineer who can design medallion Delta layers, codify Unity Catalog governance in Terraform, wire Workflows and Delta Live Tables into CI/CD, and keep your DBU bill honest. That's our practice.
$25/hr
Starting rate
3 days
Free PoC delivery
45%
Avg DBU reduction
Greenfield Lakehouse? Unity Catalog upgrade? Out-of-control DBU bill? Brief us in 60 seconds. We'll match a senior engineer in 24 hours and ship a working slice against your real data in 3 days — free.
Replies within 4 business hours · No agency fee
Six engagements we've shipped in the last twelve months. None of them are "I ran a notebook on the cluster."
Medallion Delta architecture (bronze / silver / gold), Auto Loader + Structured Streaming ingestion, Delta Live Tables for declarative pipelines, Unity Catalog with row-level masking and column tags, infrastructure codified in Terraform.
14-day audits that cut DBU spend 40–65%. Cluster-policy redesign, job-to-serverless migration, query rewrites, Delta compaction and z-order, elimination of idle all-purpose clusters, photon adoption, spot-fallback policies.
Table-by-table UCX toolkit runs, ACL translation, workspace-local to metastore-local object refactors, managed identity / SCIM wiring, and zero-downtime cutover for 10,000+ Delta tables with minimum user disruption.
MLflow tracking + Model Registry, Feature Store for point-in-time correct joins, Model Serving with auto-scaling, shadow traffic for canaries, CI/CD via Databricks Asset Bundles + GitHub Actions, drift monitoring via Lakehouse Monitoring.
RAG pipelines powered by Databricks Vector Search, AI Functions for inline embedding and generation, fine-tuning of Llama / Mistral / DBRX on private data via Mosaic AI Training, and governance through Unity Catalog over model artefacts.
Structured Streaming with Kafka / Event Hubs / Kinesis, exactly-once checkpoints, schema-evolution handling with Auto Loader, Delta change data feed (CDF) for downstream consumers, and sub-minute latency SLAs for fraud and telemetry use cases.
Hands-on production experience across compute, storage, governance, orchestration and ML — not just the quick-start docs.
Every project starts with a free 3-day PoC on your real data and your real cluster, so you see working Delta tables before signing.
30-minute scoping call. We map your cloud (AWS / Azure / GCP), current state (greenfield, UC migration, cost optimization, streaming), data volume and latency SLAs, and pull 1–2 senior engineers from our bench.
Working code against your real workspace — typically one bronze → silver → gold pipeline, wired to Unity Catalog, orchestrated in Workflows, with a cost and performance readout at the end.
Fixed-scope build or dedicated-engineer model. Daily standups in your Slack / Teams, code in your repo reviewed by your team, Databricks Asset Bundles wired to CI/CD from day one.
Lakehouse Monitoring dashboards, DBU cost charts per pipeline, runbooks for failure modes, and a formal handover to your run team — or continued fractional engineering if you prefer.
Three engagement models. No setup fee, no DBU markup, no minimum term beyond the current sprint.
3 days
Free
One pipeline, end-to-end, in your workspace against your real data. Wired to Unity Catalog. Zero commitment.
6–20 weeks
$60K – $350K
Defined deliverable, fixed price, fixed timeline. Best when scope is clear — Lakehouse build, UC migration, MLOps platform.
Monthly
$25 – $95/hr
Embed a senior Databricks engineer in your team. Best when scope evolves or platform is under continuous pressure.
We're not a generalist consultancy with a "data" page. Lakehouse is a practice — we've been shipping on Delta since 0.7.
Every engineer ships a Delta + DLT + UC exercise during interview — no whiteboard puzzles or BigTech trivia.
We'd rather show you a working Delta pipeline than sell you a capability deck. If the PoC isn't great, no invoice.
Every engagement is Unity-first with Terraform IaC and SCIM-driven identity — you never end up on hive_metastore by accident.
We'll tell you when Databricks is the wrong tool and you should just run dbt on Snowflake. We get paid to ship, not to upsell DBUs.
A generic data engineer can move CSVs through Airflow. A Databricks engineer ships production Lakehouse platforms — medallion-layer Delta tables with the right partitioning, z-ordering and liquid clustering; governance via Unity Catalog with row-level and column-level masking; orchestration with Workflows and Delta Live Tables; and cost control that keeps the finance team from turning the cluster off. It is a different discipline because the platform combines lake, warehouse, ML and governance in one engine.
All three. We have senior engineers who've built on Databricks on AWS (IAM passthrough, instance profiles, S3 bucket policies), Databricks on Azure (managed identity, Azure Data Lake Gen2, Key Vault secret scopes), and Databricks on GCP (workload identity federation, GCS, BigQuery federation via Lakehouse Federation). We match the engineer to your cloud — not the other way around.
Unity Catalog is the default. Every greenfield Lakehouse we build lands with a three-level namespace (catalog.schema.table), a metastore wired to your cloud identity provider (Entra ID / Okta / IAM Identity Center via SCIM), service principals for CI/CD, and row-level and column-level masking policies codified in Terraform. For existing workspaces on hive_metastore we also run UC upgrade migrations — including the table-by-table UCX toolkit runs and ACL translation.
Yes. We ship production MLOps on Databricks — MLflow tracking with model registry, Feature Store for point-in-time correct joins, Model Serving endpoints with auto-scaling and shadow traffic, and Mosaic AI for fine-tuning open-source LLMs (Llama, Mistral, DBRX) on your private data. We've delivered RAG pipelines using Vector Search and AI Functions, and full MLOps platforms with GitHub Actions + Databricks Asset Bundles.
Dedicated engineer from $25/hr (mid-level offshore) to $95/hr (US senior solutions architect). Short-term Databricks audits (cost optimization, UC migration readiness, Delta performance) are fixed-scope from $6K. Full Lakehouse build-outs are typically fixed-price between $60K and $350K depending on data volume, source count and governance complexity. Every engagement starts with a free 3-day PoC against your real data.
Cost optimization is a practice of its own. We've cut customer DBU spend by 40–65% through cluster-policy redesign (photon + autoscaling + spot fallback), job-to-serverless migration where it makes sense, Delta optimization (compaction, z-order, liquid clustering, auto-compact), query rewriting (avoiding collect/toPandas), and eliminating idle all-purpose clusters. We produce a 14-day optimization report with before/after DBU per pipeline.
Yes. We use Lakehouse Federation to query Snowflake / BigQuery / Postgres / Redshift without copying data. We build bi-directional flows — Delta Sharing out, Fivetran / Airbyte / Kafka Connect in, SAP BW/4 via OpenHub or via SAP ECC change data capture with HVR or Qlik Replicate. For real-time use cases we use Structured Streaming with Auto Loader and Kafka-based exactly-once semantics.
Brief us on what you're building or where you're stuck. We'll match a senior engineer in 24 hours and ship a working slice by the end of the week — free.