Defense Unicorns

Defense Unicorns

Senior FDE Data Engineer

United States - Remote · Senior · Contract

No sponsorship$149k-$201kDetected 27 days ago
SQLPostgreSQLAWSGCPAzureCloud PlatformsKubernetesTerraformHelmCI/CDLinuxRESTKafkaOAuthMachine LearningSparkAirflowData EngineeringIncident ResponseRecruitingCommunicationMentoring

About the role

  • EMPLOYER IS A CONTRACTOR FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT.
  • THIS POSITION WILL REQUIRE U.S. CITIZENSHIP.
  • Role Description This is a forward-deployed engineering role.

Responsibilities

  • Own the integration with existing mission systems.
  • Prior experience integrating with these types of systems is more relevant than experience building on them.
  • Build pipelines that move data through classification boundaries, including ingestion, transformation, catalog registration, model/dataset packaging via Zarf, cross-domain transit, and eventual consistency across DDIL conditions.
  • Grow junior Data Engineer FDEs. Pair on hard problems, review integration designs before they reach the customer, and accelerate technical development across the team. This is a mentorship role, not a management one.
  • About 20% of your time, you'll also invest in the forward-deployed team itself, pairing with junior Data Engineer FDEs on hard problems and helping them develop the technical judgment that only comes from field experience.
  • General understanding of how data infrastructure supports model training, versioning, provenance, and AI operations.
  • Building and improving security delivery
  • Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications

Requirements

  • Comfort being the technical face of Defense Unicorns to a mission hero.
  • Deep K8s expertise is not required; general familiarity with deployments, operators, and how applications run on Kubernetes is valuable.

Nice to have

  • Data provenance, lineage, and governance.
  • Experience with lineage tracking, data catalogs, provenance systems, or governance frameworks.
  • Depth here will be weighted heavily.
  • DoD or defense program experience.
  • Active Secret clearance (or higher).
  • Lakehouse & storage: Apache Iceberg (or Delta/Hudi), object storage (Ceph/S3-compatible), Postgres (including extensions like pgvector), columnar/OLAP engines (Trino, DuckDB, ClickHouse, Spark SQL).
  • Change Data Capture: Debezium or similar CDC patterns.
  • Governance, catalog & access: REST catalogs (Iceberg REST, Polaris/Gravitino/Nessie family), ABAC/RBAC patterns, OIDC/OAuth, lineage and audit.

Compensation

  • ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States.

Benefits

  • Medical/Dental/Vision
  • Health Savings Account
  • Life Insurance

Company info

  • Kubernetes
  • Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
  • Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
  • Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
  • GitOps
  • Containers
  • CNCF projects and open source products and packages
  • Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
  • Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges.
  • We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation.
  • Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security.
  • Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market.
  • We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery.

Visa & Work Authorization

  • Clearance sponsorship available for the right candidate.
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This listing is sourced directly from Defense Unicorns's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.