Senior Engineer - Data Platform

Defense Unicorns is building a groundbreaking new product capability from the ground up, offering a Senior Engineer a pivotal role in its founding team. This position is ideal for a full-stack engineer who thrives on owning the entire software lifecycle, from customer interaction to production deployment, especially within challenging open and classified environments. With a focus on open-source solutions for defense, this role promises significant impact, mentorship opportunities, and the chance to work with cutting-edge technologies like Kubernetes and AI-assisted data systems. ### 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. 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 Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. 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 experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market. ### What We Do We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery. Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners. Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily. ### Who We Serve Defense Unicorns’ customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises. 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) * Continuous Delivery and automation tooling * GitOps * Containers * CNCF projects and open source products and packages * Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping * Building and improving security delivery * Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications ### Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy ### Health: * Medical/Dental/Vision * Premiums are 100% Company Paid * Health Savings Account * Life Insurance * Disability Insurance ### Financial: * 401k Retirement Plan * Company Stock Options * 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: * Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions * Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees) 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. CCPA DISCLOSURE