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Defense Unicorns is seeking a Senior Data Engineer for a forward-deployed role supporting U.S. Department of Defense missions. This is a hybrid position combining remote work with periodic on-site travel to customer environments (1-2 days/week for local candidates in Colorado Springs or Florida Space Coast; ~1 week every 4-6 weeks for remote candidates).
You will deploy, harden, and operate the UDS Data Capability platform in classified DoD environments. Responsibilities include standing up the full data stack (Iceberg, Rook/Ceph, pgvector, Postgres, Kafka/Strimzi), integrating with legacy government systems (databases, SOAP/REST endpoints, message buses, identity providers), mapping complex data landscapes across hundreds of interconnected systems of record, building pipelines that move data across classification boundaries, establishing data provenance and governance practices, and generating accreditation artifacts (STIG evidence, cATO documentation, FIPS validation).
You will own day-2 operations including capacity planning, performance tuning, backup/restore (Velero), observability (Vector/Loki), incident response, and upgrade management. You'll transfer knowledge to the mission team through runbooks, architecture documentation, and working sessions. Approximately 20% of your time involves mentoring junior Data Engineer FDEs—pairing on hard problems, reviewing designs, and accelerating their technical development through field experience.
The role requires navigating ambiguity in complex data environments, delivering working solutions in constrained mission-critical settings, and serving as the voice of the customer back to product engineering. You'll be shoulder-to-shoulder with operators and program engineers running real workloads in real DoD environments, taking data capabilities from deployable to production under classification.
Required: U.S. citizenship (government contractor position). Preferred locations are Colorado Springs, CO or Florida Space Coast (Cape Canaveral/Cocoa Beach/Melbourne area), though remote candidates will be considered.
