Associate Engineer - Data Platform

About the Role

Defense Unicorns is looking for an Associate Engineer who is energized by learning, ready to engage in hands-on development, and motivated by ensuring software functions correctly. This role is designed for individuals early in their careers who seek rapid growth in a technically challenging environment and wish to contribute to impactful systems.

Responsibilities

• Write and maintain integration, end-to-end, and regression test suites to ensure shipping confidence.
• Develop automated tests and documentation that are easily reproducible by other engineers.
• Package and deploy open-source software components within Kubernetes environments.
• Build and maintain seed data tooling and scripts to make the platform demonstrable.
• Contribute to internal tooling, dashboards, and documentation.
• Write clear bug reports and reproduction steps for immediate team action.
• Actively participate in code reviews, seeking and incorporating feedback to enhance technical judgment.

Travel Expectations/Requirements

• 10-20% travel, primarily for customer engagements and company gatherings.

What You’ll Work On

• Test suites and validation tooling for new capabilities.
• Deployment automation and tooling to enable platform setup from scratch by any engineer.
• Bug reports and edge case documentation to accelerate issue resolution.
• Runbooks and demo scripts to make complex distributed systems understandable.

Required Qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related technical field, OR equivalent demonstrated hands-on technical ability.
• Active and proficient user of AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor) with strong prompting, output validation, and error detection skills.
• An orientation towards testing and validation, with a proactive approach to identifying and documenting issues.
• U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain a security clearance.

Preferred Experience and Qualifications

• Comfort with at least one programming language (Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar) and willingness to learn the required stack.
• Genuine curiosity about distributed systems, including their failure modes.
• Comfort with command-line tooling and Linux environments.
• Ability to write clear and concise bug reports and documentation.
• Comfortable working asynchronously in a remote environment.

Amazing To Haves

• Any exposure to Kubernetes (e.g., running a local cluster).
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker).
• Experience with databases (relational, document, key-value).
• Coursework or personal projects involving data, AI, or machine learning.
• Interest in defense, national security software, or government technology.
• Contributions to open-source projects.

Compensation

$102,000—$138,000 USD (based on candidate experience)

Location

Remote - USA

About Defense Unicorns

Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery, enabling customers to focus on critical challenges. They foster a vision of freedom and security for progress and innovation, prioritizing speed, user experience, and optionality without compromising security. The team comprises innovators, software engineers, and veterans with extensive experience in the federal market.

What Defense Unicorns Does

They create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery, consolidating best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation to meet high security requirements. Their solutions are designed to be agnostic, promoting a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software for easier integration.

Who Defense Unicorns Serves

Their customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises, including defense and civil agencies within the U.S. government. They collaborate with creators of leading-edge software solutions to enhance security and usability.

Technologies We Work On

• Kubernetes
• Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/Pulumi)
• Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
• GitOps
• Containers
• CNCF projects and open-source products
• Helm/Kustomize
• Value Stream Mapping
• Security Delivery Improvement
• Kubernetes and cloud-native application development

Benefits

Health:

• Medical/Dental/Vision (Premiums 100% Company Paid)
• Health Savings Account
• Life Insurance
• Disability Insurance

Financial:

• 401k Retirement Plan
• Company Stock Options
• Home Office Budget

Leave:

• Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus Federal Holidays, Thanksgiving week, and Christmas/New Year's break
• Paid Parental Leave

Learning:

• Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
• Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)

Defense Unicorns is committed to diversity and encourages candidates who are enthusiastic about the role but may not meet every single qualification to apply.