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Best fit if you want senior data engineering tied to defense software delivery rather than ad-tech analytics. Thin public employee-review data; judge culture from company product news and your own diligence.
As a Senior FDE Data Engineer at Defense Unicorns, expect work that bridges field/mission software delivery and data pipelines: shaping schemas and ingestion for edge or shipboard prototypes, hardening pipelines for constrained environments, pairing with platform and mission teams on UDS-style deployments, and turning operator feedback into reliable data services—not pure warehouse BI.
Listing flags remote as no; location is United States without a more specific city in the provided data.
Public news points to mission software at the tactical edge (e.g., UDS Fleet) and Navy software prototype work with partners.
No certification family or resources were provided for this occupation in the data.
Website: defenseunicorns.com
Public cache only — not an employee review.
Defense Unicorns is hiring a Senior FDE Data Engineer in the United States to embed directly with the operators, program engineers, and end users who run real Department of Defense workloads — taking our UDS Data Capability from deployable to fully operational under classification. About the Role This is a forward-deployed engineering position. As a Senior FDE Data Engineer, you'll partner closely with mission teams to deploy, harden, integrate, and operate our data platform in their environment, then feed everything you learn back into the product so the next engagement runs smoother. Forward-deployed means you're aligned with the mission — most work happens remotely over video and shared channels, with site visits when an engagement genuinely warrants it. Expect roughly 10%–25% travel, including time in SCIFs and other restricted spaces. You'll wear several hats here: data engineer, data scientist, and hands-on problem solver across the full platform — storage, ingestion, streaming, governance, access, and the Kubernetes layer beneath it all. Key Responsibilities Stand up and harden UDS Data Capability — UDS Store (Iceberg, Rook/Ceph, pgvector, Postgres), UDS Transit for air-gap movement, UDS Govern (Pepr/Lula), and UDS Connect (Strimzi/Kafka). Integrate with existing systems: Big Bang, legacy Oracle and SQL Server, flat-file drops, SOAP/REST endpoints, message buses, object storage, and identity providers like Keycloak. Build pipelines that move data across classification boundaries — ingestion, transformation, catalog registration, Zarf packaging, and cross-domain transit under DDIL conditions. Own day-2 operations: capacity, performance, backup/restore (Velero), observability (Vector/Loki), incident response, and upgrades — then hand off to the customer's ops team. Produce accreditation evidence — STIG artifacts, cATO documentation, FIPS notes, and policy mappings for IL4/IL5 environments. Channel field experience back to product, and mentor junior Data Engineer FDEs (roughly 20% of your time) through pairing and design review. Qualifications U.S. citizenship required; this employer is a U.S. government contractor. Active DoD clearance required — TS/SCI preferred, minimum active Secret with the ability to obtain TS/SCI. Broad data engineering experience: Iceberg (or Delta/Hudi), object storage, Postgres, an OLAP engine (Trino, DuckDB, ClickHouse, Spark SQL), Kafka, CDC (Debezium), and orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, Argo). Production Kubernetes, Linux, networking,…
Generated for personal interview prep · 2026-07-15 UTC · getajob.ai