Toptal: Senior Data/ML Engineer — Databricks Forecasting Platform
Headquarters: Remote
URL: https://www.toptal.com/
About the Role
We're looking for a Senior Data/ML Engineer to refactor, operationalize, and improve an existing time series forecasting platform that's already live and driving real business value. This is not a greenfield build — the focus is modernizing a Databricks-based forecasting system that's been maintained primarily by a single developer for years. You'll reduce technical debt, strengthen testing and observability, and raise the engineering bar on a system the business already depends on. If you'd rather bring discipline and maturity to an existing production system than start from a blank slate, this is built for that.
What You'll Do
- Review the current forecasting platform architecture and identify areas for improvement.
- Refactor existing Databricks, Python, and PySpark implementations.
- Move business logic out of Databricks notebooks and into reusable Python modules or packages.
- Improve separation of concerns between orchestration and core business logic.
- Establish stronger engineering standards and help define what "good" looks like for the platform.
- Implement or improve automated testing practices and validation mechanisms for forecasting workflows.
- Build or improve monitoring and observability, increasing visibility into how predictions are generated.
- Help monitor model behavior and operational health over time.
- Improve reliability of scheduled training workflows, reducing manual intervention on failure.
- Improve failure handling, retries, and overall workflow resilience.
- Maintain and extend existing forecasting capabilities as needed.
What You Bring
- Strong professional experience with Databricks, including workspaces, notebooks, scheduled workflows, and CI/CD processes.
- Strong Python engineering experience, including designing reusable modules or packages.
- Strong PySpark experience with production data pipelines or distributed data processing.
- Experience refactoring production code and improving maintainability.
- Familiarity with time series forecasting concepts and workflows.
- Ability to understand and work effectively within an existing, unfamiliar codebase.
- Experience improving software quality, testing strategy, and engineering standards.
- Experience implementing automated testing practices.
- Experience improving monitoring, observability, or operational visibility for production systems.
- Strong judgment around technical debt, refactoring priorities, and maintainable architecture.
- Ability to work with existing systems rather than only building from scratch.
Why This Role
- Real production impact: Improve a system the business already relies on, not a proof-of-concept.
- Engineering maturity focus: Bring testing, observability, and maintainability to a platform that's outgrown its current state.
- Meaningful ownership: Help define engineering standards for the forecasting platform going forward.
- Flexible location: Preference for Toronto or St. Louis, but open to remote consultants globally with North American working-hours overlap.
How to Apply
Ready to bring engineering rigor to a production forecasting platform? Apply through Toptal here: https://www.toptal.com/talent/apply
Original Posting: We Work Remotely