engineering
Posted Jun 15Senior Engineer - Data Platform
United StatesRemote
Responsibilities
- 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
- Write comprehensive tests at every level — unit, integration, and end-to-end — and hold the rest of the team to the same standard
- Develop technical documentation including design specifications, ADRs, and runbooks
Requirements
- This role requires strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to work across the full stack — from designing and building features to deploying and validating them in the environments where they need to run.
- 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.
- 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 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 communication and documentation skills — comfortable writing ADRs, design docs, and runbooks
- U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain and maintain a security clearance Preferred Experience and
- Familiarity with PostgreSQL (including extensions such as pgvector), S3-compatible object-storage, and streaming systems such as Kafka •
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, GitOps practices, and DevSecOps workflows
- Experience with CNCF data ecosystem projects (Argo Workflows, Strimzi, Apache Iceberg, Trino)
- Familiarity with UDS Core, or Zarf •
- Experience with AI-adjacent data infrastructure — vector databases, embedding pipelines, RAG systems, knowledge graphs, or semantic search
- Experience working with or for defense programs, DoD software factories, or Platform One equivalents
- Familiarity with DoD data governance frameworks (VAULTIS, CDAO data mesh reference architecture) •
- 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
Experience
- 5+ years of software engineering
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
- Defense Unicorns is seeking a Senior Engineer to join the founding team of a new product capability being built from the ground up.
- The gap between a customer conversation and code running in production is short, and you are expected to own that entire arc.
- experience and will help mentor and grow less experienced engineers on the team.
- You will work closely with product, engineering leads, and defense customers across the branches and other mission programs.
- You can identify and solve problems across open and classified environments where available tooling is different or limited.
- You find the constraints of disconnected environments interesting rather than limiting. Responsibilities
- Work directly with product and customers to translate mission problems into platform capabilities
- Contribute to relevant open source communities and represent Defense Unicorns as a technical peer
- Provide technical mentorship and elevate engineering standards across the team
- Operate effectively in an asynchronous, fully remote environment