FDE Data Engineer- Space (FedD147)

Defense Unicorns

130d•Remote

About The Position

This is a forward-deployed data engineering role supporting U.S. Department of Defense mission environments. The engineer works directly with users, operators, and program engineers to deploy, integrate, and operate UDS Data Capability in production, including under classified conditions. The work ranges from standing up governed data platforms for well-defined sources to helping map and consolidate data across hundreds of interconnected government systems. The engineer works alongside senior engineers and mission stakeholders, then brings lessons from the field back to product and engineering teams. Most work is remote, with periodic on-site travel for activities such as initial standup, integration, incident response, training, and knowledge transfer. The role requires building across data-platform capabilities—including storage, ingestion, streaming, governance, and access—and delivering working solutions in constrained, mission-critical environments. The engineer also supports day-two operations, accreditation evidence, documentation, and handoff to the mission team's operations staff.

Requirements

U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance; clearance sponsorship is available for the right candidate.
Experience storing and querying large unstructured datasets using data lake architectures; Spark experience is preferred.
Experience with stream-processing infrastructure such as Kafka, Redpanda, or Flink, and integrating heterogeneous sources into modern pipelines.
Experience with open-source data warehousing platforms and comfort building without proprietary platforms.
Experience with pipeline orchestration tools such as Airflow, Dagster, or Argo Workflows, including building, scheduling, monitoring, and recovering production pipelines.
Fluency in SQL and comfort designing schemas for analytical and operational workloads.
Comfort building on open-source tooling and contributing back to it.
Ability to work directly with mission users and government stakeholders and communicate clearly with technical and non-technical audiences.
Comfort with periodic on-site work, sometimes for days at a stretch, and remote collaboration.
Bias toward delivery and shipping working integrations against real workloads.
Self-direction and ability to work through undocumented environments and problems independently.

Nice To Haves

Experience with data provenance, lineage, and governance, including lineage tracking, data catalogs, provenance systems, or governance frameworks; depth in this area is weighted heavily.
DoD or defense program experience.
Active Secret clearance or higher.
Experience with Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, or Hudi; Ceph or S3-compatible object storage; Postgres and extensions such as pgvector; or columnar/OLAP engines such as Trino, DuckDB, ClickHouse, or Spark SQL.
Experience with Debezium or similar change-data-capture patterns.
Familiarity with REST catalogs such as Iceberg REST or the Polaris/Gravitino/Nessie family; ABAC/RBAC; OIDC/OAuth; lineage; and audit.
General Kubernetes familiarity, including deployments, operators, and how applications run on Kubernetes.
Knowledge of Linux fundamentals, container runtime behavior, networking, TLS, and secrets management.
Experience with IaC tools such as Terraform or Pulumi and GitOps patterns such as Flux or ArgoCD.
Familiarity with the CNCF ecosystem and the distinction between foundation projects and single-vendor projects.
General understanding of how data infrastructure supports model training, versioning, provenance, and AI operations.
Familiarity with Air Force or Space Force systems of record, such as MILPDS or ARMS, and how data flows between them.

Responsibilities

Deploy and configure UDS Data Capability in mission environments, including UDS Store, UDS Transit, UDS Govern, and UDS Connect components as needed.
Build and support integrations with legacy databases, flat-file drops, SOAP/REST endpoints, message buses, object storage, and identity providers.
Help map complex data landscapes, trace data flows, and identify dependencies across interconnected systems of record.
Build pipelines that move data across classification boundaries, including ingestion, transformation, catalog registration, dataset packaging via Zarf, cross-domain transit, and handling eventual consistency under DDIL conditions.
Implement data provenance, lineage, and governance practices, including tracking data origins, transformations, and access.
Operate deployed systems, including capacity and performance management, backup and restore, observability, incident response, and upgrades; hand off stable systems to mission operations teams.
Generate accreditation artifacts such as STIG evidence, cATO documentation, FIPS validation notes, and policy mappings for IL4/IL5 environments.
Provide field feedback to product and engineering teams through issues, postmortems, and reports on mission-environment performance.
Support training and knowledge transfer through runbooks, architecture documentation, and working sessions.
Adapt to evolving organizational needs and take on additional responsibilities as assigned.