Senior Engineer - Data Platform (RD044)

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.

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

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
• 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 ✨🦄
• 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