data
Posted 2 hours agoSenior FDE Data Engineer
United StatesRemote
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Responsibilities
- Deploy and harden UDS Data Capability in the mission hero's environment — stand up the UDS Store (Iceberg, Rook/Ceph, pgvector, Postgres), wire up UDS Transit for air-gap data movement, configure UDS Govern policies (Pepr/Lula), and integrate UDS Connect (Strimzi/Kafka) where streaming or legacy connectors are required.
- Own the integration with what they already have — connect UDS Data Capability to whatever's already running: Big Bang, legacy Oracle and SQL Server, flat-file drops, SOAP/REST endpoints, message buses, existing object storage, identity providers (Keycloak, mission-side SSO).
- Build pipelines that move data through classification boundaries — ingestion, transformation, catalog registration, model/dataset packaging via Zarf, cross-domain transit, eventual consistency across DDIL conditions.
- Operate what you deploy — initial day-2 ownership: capacity, performance, backup/restore (Velero), observability (Vector/Loki), incident response, upgrade paths.
- Generate accreditation artifacts — STIG evidence, cATO documentation, FIPS validation notes, policy mappings.
- Grow junior Data Engineer FDEs — pair on hard problems, review integration designs before they reach the customer, and help junior engineers build judgment faster than they would alone.
- responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional
Requirements
- You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with mission heroes — the users, operators, and program engineers who run real workloads in real DoD environments — and you'll be the person who takes UDS Data Capability from "deployable" to "running in production under classification." You will deploy, harden, integrate, and operate our data stack in the mission hero's environment, then carry what you learn back into the product so the next engagement is easier.
- You can take responsibility for the full breadth of a data platform — storage, ingestion, streaming, governance, access, and the Kubernetes machinery underneath all of it — make it work where it has to work, analyze what's running through it, and solve problems in real time for the mission hero.
- Train and transfer — leave the mission hero's team self-sufficient: runbooks, architecture docs, working sessions, knowledge transfer.
- experience with Apache Iceberg (or Delta/Hudi), object storage (Ceph/S3-compatible), Postgres (including extensions like pgvector), and at least one columnar/OLAP engine (Trino, DuckDB, ClickHouse, Spark SQL).
- Streaming & integration — Kafka (preferably Strimzi on Kubernetes), Flink or equivalent stream processing, CDC patterns (Debezium), and the ability to bridge legacy systems (Oracle, SQL Server, flat files, SOAP) into modern pipelines.
- Data modeling & SQL — fluent in SQL; comfortable designing schemas for both analytical and operational workloads.
- Kubernetes in production — deployments, operators, CRDs, storage classes, networking. You don't have to write controllers from scratch, but you can read and debug them.
- Linux fundamentals, container runtime behavior, networking, TLS, secrets management.
- IaC (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) and GitOps patterns (Flux, ArgoCD).
- Familiarity with the CNCF ecosystem — what's a foundation project, what's a single-vendor project, why it matters.
- Active DoD security clearance required — TS/SCI preferred; minimum active Secret with the ability to obtain TS/SCI.
- experience delivering technology programs across the federal market. What We Do
- We proudly support defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products. What We Work On Kubernetes
- Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
- Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
- Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications
Benefits
- Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience.
- Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States.
- Remote - USA $148,750 — $201,250 USD Who We Are
- 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
- Medical/Dental/Vision
- Premiums are 100% Company Paid
- Health Savings Account Life Insurance
- Disability Insurance Financial:
- 401k Retirement Plan
- Home Office Budget Leave:
- 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 Learning:
Additional details
- EMPLOYER IS A CONTRACTOR FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. THIS POSITION WILL REQUIRE U.S. CITIZENSHIP. Role Description
- Forward-deployed means aligned with the mission hero , not always on a plane .
- You'll travel to sites when the engagement genuinely calls for it — initial standup, in-SCIF integration work, on-the-ground incident response, training and knowledge transfer — and you'll be on a video call or in a shared chat with that same mission hero the rest of the time.
- The job is being their engineer, not living at their desk.
- About 20% of your time, you'll also be what makes Defense Unicorns' forward-deployed team itself better — pairing with junior Data Engineer FDEs on hard problems, helping them develop the technical judgment that only comes from doing hard things, and raising the ceiling on what the team can take on. Responsibilities:
- Hand off to the mission hero's ops team once it's stable.
- You produce the evidence the mission hero's ISSM/ISSO needs to actually run this in IL4/IL5.
- Be the voice of the mission hero back to product and engineering — file the issues, write the postmortems, propose the operator improvements, push the platform team on what's actually breaking in the field. Your field
- You're not managing anyone; you're making the team better.
- responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving needs of the organization. We are seeking a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new