Senior FDE Data Engineer

Defense Unicorns is a company dedicated to delivering mission value by streamlining software delivery for their customers. They are seeking a Senior FDE Data Engineer to work closely with mission heroes in deploying and operating their data capabilities in real DoD environments, while also mentoring junior engineers and improving team performance.

Responsibilities:

• Deploy and harden UDS Data Capability in the mission hero's environment — stand up the UDS Store (Iceberg, Rook/Ceph, pgvector, Postgres), wire up UDS Transit for air-gap data movement, configure UDS Govern policies (Pepr/Lula), and integrate UDS Connect (Strimzi/Kafka) where streaming or legacy connectors are required
• Own the integration with what they already have — connect UDS Data Capability to whatever's already running: Big Bang, legacy Oracle and SQL Server, flat-file drops, SOAP/REST endpoints, message buses, existing object storage, identity providers (Keycloak, mission-side SSO)
• Build pipelines that move data through classification boundaries — ingestion, transformation, catalog registration, model/dataset packaging via Zarf, cross-domain transit, eventual consistency across DDIL conditions
• Operate what you deploy — initial day-2 ownership: capacity, performance, backup/restore (Velero), observability (Vector/Loki), incident response, upgrade paths. Hand off to the mission hero's ops team once it's stable
• Generate accreditation artifacts — STIG evidence, cATO documentation, FIPS validation notes, policy mappings. You produce the evidence the mission hero's ISSM/ISSO needs to actually run this in IL4/IL5
• Be the voice of the mission hero back to product and engineering — file the issues, write the postmortems, propose the operator improvements, push the platform team on what's actually breaking in the field. Your field experience is the highest-signal input we have
• Train and transfer — leave the mission hero's team self-sufficient: runbooks, architecture docs, working sessions, knowledge transfer
• Grow junior Data Engineer FDEs — pair on hard problems, review integration designs before they reach the customer, and help junior engineers build judgment faster than they would alone. You're not managing anyone; you're making the team better

Requirements:

• U.S. Citizenship required
• Active DoD security clearance required — TS/SCI preferred; minimum active Secret with the ability to obtain TS/SCI
• Experience with deploying and hardening data capabilities in mission environments
• Ability to integrate data capabilities with existing systems
• Experience building data pipelines that move data through classification boundaries
• Initial day-2 ownership of deployed systems including capacity, performance, backup/restore, observability, incident response, and upgrade paths
• Ability to generate accreditation artifacts such as STIG evidence, cATO documentation, and FIPS validation notes
• Experience training and transferring knowledge to mission teams
• Ability to mentor junior Data Engineer FDEs
• Comfort with on-site work in SCIFs and other restricted spaces
• Self-direction and ability to adapt to mission environments
• Production experience with Apache Iceberg (or Delta/Hudi), object storage (Ceph/S3-compatible), Postgres (including extensions like pgvector), and at least one columnar/OLAP engine (Trino, DuckDB, ClickHouse, Spark SQL)
• Experience with Kafka (preferably Strimzi on Kubernetes), Flink or equivalent stream processing, CDC patterns (Debezium), and bridging legacy systems into modern pipelines
• Experience with Airflow, Dagster, Argo Workflows, or similar for building, scheduling, monitoring, and recovering production data pipelines
• Familiarity with REST catalogs (Iceberg REST, Polaris/Gravitino/Nessie family), ABAC/RBAC patterns, OIDC/OAuth, lineage and audit
• Fluency in SQL and comfort designing schemas for both analytical and operational workloads
• Experience with Kubernetes in production including deployments, operators, CRDs, storage classes, and networking
• Understanding of Linux fundamentals, container runtime behavior, networking, TLS, and secrets management
• Experience with IaC (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) and GitOps patterns (Flux, ArgoCD)
• Familiarity with the CNCF ecosystem