Senior FDE Data Engineer

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, TLS, secrets, IaC (Terraform/Pulumi), and GitOps (Flux/ArgoCD).
• Strong SQL, governance and catalog familiarity (Iceberg REST, Polaris/Nessie), and ABAC/RBAC, OIDC/OAuth patterns.
• Clear communicator who can be the technical face to a mission team across technical and non-technical audiences.

About Defense Unicorns

Defense Unicorns builds mission-ready software platforms for the most demanding national security environments, helping teams ship and operate critical capabilities securely at the edge.

How to Apply

To apply, complete your application directly on this page, or you'll be redirected to the employer's application platform to finish submitting there.