Senior Engineer - Data Platform

Role Description

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Senior Engineer to join the founding team of a new product capability being built from the ground up. In this role, you will work as a core member of the UDS Data team — collaborating directly with product leadership and engaging with defense customers to translate real operational data problems into shipped software. The gap between a customer conversation and code running in production is short, and you are expected to own that entire arc.

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 will work in a team of varying experience and will help mentor and grow less experienced engineers on the team. 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.

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

• 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
• Work directly with product and customers to translate mission problems into platform capabilities
• Develop technical documentation including design specifications, ADRs, and runbooks
• 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

Travel Expectations/Requirements

Travel: 10-20%, primarily for customer engagements and company gatherings.

What You'll Work On

• A capability discovery and provisioning system that lets applications find and connect to governed data at deploy time — without hardcoded configuration
• Data infrastructure that runs identically in cloud, on-premise, and fully airgapped environments
• 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
• Access control enforcement that is enforced by the platform, not by convention — applications get what they're authorized for and nothing else

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering 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 testing discipline — integration tests, end-to-end tests, and a clear opinion on what makes a test suite trustworthy
• 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 Qualifications

• Experience designing and building data infrastructure — databases, object storage, streaming systems, or data pipelines
• Experience packaging and deploying software in airgap or disconnected environments
• Familiarity with PostgreSQL (including extensions such as pgvector), S3-compatible object-storage, and streaming systems such as Kafka
• Experience building and maintaining REST APIs and defining API schemas (ConnectRPC with protocol buffers, OpenAPI)
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, GitOps practices, and DevSecOps workflows
• Excited to work in the open: contributions to open source projects are a strong plus ✨🦄

Amazing To Haves

• 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
• Active security clearance (Secret or higher)
• 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 building or operating data platforms in classified or air-gapped environments

Don't have all the preferred experience or qualifications? Studies show that underrepresented groups like women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs if they don't meet every requirement listed. At Defense Unicorns, we're committed to diversity. If you're enthusiastic about the role but don't match every criteria, we encourage you to apply. You could be the perfect fit for this or another role! Defense Unicorns is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, union status and/or beliefs, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.