Senior Engineer - Data Platform

Defense Unicorns

1d•$148,750 - $201,250•Remote

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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
Contributions to open source projects are a strong plus
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

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