[Remote] Senior FDE Data Engineer

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Defense Unicorns is a company dedicated to delivering mission value by streamlining software delivery for their customers. They are seeking a Senior FDE Data Engineer to work closely with mission heroes in deploying and operating their data capabilities in real DoD environments, while also mentoring junior engineers and improving team performance.ResponsibilitiesDeploy 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 requiredOwn 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 conditionsOperate what you deploy — initial day-2 ownership: capacity, performance, backup/restore (Velero), observability (Vector/Loki), incident response, upgrade paths. Hand off to the mission hero's ops team once it's stableGenerate accreditation artifacts — STIG evidence, cATO documentation, FIPS validation notes, policy mappings. You produce the evidence the mission hero's ISSM/ISSO needs to actually run this in IL4/IL5Be 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 experience is the highest-signal input we haveTrain and transfer — leave the mission hero's team self-sufficient: runbooks, architecture docs, working sessions, knowledge transferGrow 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. You're not managing anyone; you're making the team betterSkillsU.S. Citizenship requiredActive DoD security clearance required — TS/SCI preferred; minimum active Secret with the ability to obtain TS/SCIExperience with deploying and hardening data capabilities in mission environmentsAbility to integrate data capabilities with existing systemsExperience building data pipelines that move data through classification boundariesInitial day-2 ownership of deployed systems including capacity, performance, backup/restore, observability, incident response, and upgrade pathsAbility to generate accreditation artifacts such as STIG evidence, cATO documentation, and FIPS validation notesExperience training and transferring knowledge to mission teamsAbility to mentor junior Data Engineer FDEsComfort with on-site work in SCIFs and other restricted spacesSelf-direction and ability to adapt to mission environmentsProduction 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)Experience with Kafka (preferably Strimzi on Kubernetes), Flink or equivalent stream processing, CDC patterns (Debezium), and bridging legacy systems into modern pipelinesExperience with Airflow, Dagster, Argo Workflows, or similar for building, scheduling, monitoring, and recovering production data pipelinesFamiliarity with REST catalogs (Iceberg REST, Polaris/Gravitino/Nessie family), ABAC/RBAC patterns, OIDC/OAuth, lineage and auditFluency in SQL and comfort designing schemas for both analytical and operational workloadsExperience with Kubernetes in production including deployments, operators, CRDs, storage classes, and networkingUnderstanding of Linux fundamentals, container runtime behavior, networking, TLS, and secrets managementExperience with IaC (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) and GitOps patterns (Flux, ArgoCD)Familiarity with the CNCF ecosystemBenefitsMedical/Dental/VisionPremiums are 100% Company PaidHealth Savings AccountLife InsuranceDisability Insurance401k Retirement PlanCompany Stock OptionsHome Office BudgetWe 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’sPaid Parental LeaveReimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptionsConferences (travel, lodging, and fees)Company OverviewDefense Unicorns is a software startup that provides open-source software and AI capabilities for national security systems. It was founded in 2021, and is headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA, with a workforce of 51-200 employees. Its website is https://www.defenseunicorns.com.