Defense Unicorns

Senior Engineer - Data Platform

Remote, United States · Senior · Full-time

No sponsorship$10k-$20kDetected 36 days ago

PythonGoDistributed SystemsKubernetesCI/CDRAG

About the role

Role Description Defense Unicorns is seeking a Senior Engineer to join the founding team of a new product capability being built from the ground up.
You will work in a team of varying experience and will help mentor and grow less experienced engineers on the team.
You are comfortable picking up new tools and technologies as the stack evolves, and you bring enough breadth to be useful across infrastructure, backend, and tooling work without needing to specialize in any one area.

Own the design, delivery, and production quality of platform capabilities end to end - from initial architecture through deployment and observability
Build and maintain open source infrastructure packages for airgap and cloud-native environments
Develop technical documentation including design specifications, ADRs, and runbooks
AI-assisted search across governed mission data - the same RAG pattern proven in production to support of the US Navy Submarine programs, productized and made repeatable
Experience building or operating data platforms in classified or air-gapped environments
Building and improving security delivery
Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications

Experience with CI/CD pipelines, GitOps practices, and DevSecOps workflows
Experience with CNCF data ecosystem projects (Argo Workflows, Strimzi, Apache Iceberg, Trino)
Experience with AI-adjacent data infrastructure - vector databases, embedding pipelines, RAG systems, knowledge graphs, or semantic search

A capability discovery and provisioning system that lets applications find and connect to governed data at deploy time - without hardcoded configuration
Access control enforcement that is enforced by the platform, not by convention - applications get what they're authorized for and nothing else
5+ years of software engineering experience with a track record of shipping production systems
Proficiency in Go and/or Rust
comfort with Python for tooling and scripting
Strong understanding of Kubernetes - operators, CRDs, controllers, network policies, and workload identity
Experience with distributed systems concepts - consistency models, replication, failure modes, and recovery
Strong testing discipline - integration tests, end-to-end tests, and a clear opinion on what makes a test suite trustworthy

Data infrastructure that runs identically in cloud, on-premise, and fully airgapped environments

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

Medical/Dental/Vision
Health Savings Account
Life Insurance
Disability Insurance
401k Retirement Plan
Company Stock Options
Home Office Budget
We offer all full-time Unicorns Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year's
Paid Parental Leave

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.

This listing is sourced directly from Defense Unicorns's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.