AI FDE Engineer at Databricks - Remote UK Role — Columbus
Traveler-Friendly Insight
This role is listed as remote within the UK, which means you must be a UK resident — it is not open to nomads based abroad. Databricks explicitly states candidates must be based in the UK, which rules out working from Lisbon, Bangkok, or Medellín on a tourist or digital nomad visa.
Travel requirement: The role requires visiting customers roughly once every 4–8 weeks, which adds a light travel cadence but is manageable. This is customer-facing consulting work, so expect occasional on-site presence at enterprise clients across the UK and potentially EMEA.
Async-friendliness: The posting doesn't specify rigid core hours, but the customer-facing nature of the role means you'll need to align with UK business hours (GMT/BST). Pure async work is unlikely given the advisory and delivery responsibilities.
- Visa consideration: UK right to work is effectively required. EU/EEA nationals would need a valid UK visa (Skilled Worker visa is the typical route for sponsored roles).
- Best fit for: UK-based remote workers who want flexibility at home but don't mind periodic travel across the country or to European client sites.
If you're a nomad looking for a truly location-independent AI engineer role, this posting is not the right fit — seek out positions explicitly listing "work from anywhere" or with EMEA-wide hiring scope instead.
AI Engineer - FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer)
Req ID: CSQ427R191
Location: United Kingdom - Remote (must be based in the UK for this role)
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.
Preferred location: London, UK. Reporting to: Senior Manager - AI FDE, EMEA.
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 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 hands-on industry data science experience, leveraging common ML and data science tools (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 both non-technical and technical audiences
- 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
- Willingness to travel once every 4–8 weeks to visit customers (as needed)
About Databricks
Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 20,000 organizations worldwide — including adidas, AT&T, Bayer, Block, Mastercard, Rivian, Unilever, and 70% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data + AI Platform to build and scale data and AI apps, analytics, and agents. Headquartered in San Francisco with 30+ offices around the globe, Databricks offers a unified platform that includes Genie, Lakebase, Agent Bricks, Lakeflow, Lakehouse, and Unity Catalog. Follow Databricks on LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and Instagram.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
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