Defense Unicorns - Senior Engineer - Data Platform
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Requirements
• Travel: 10-20%, primarily for customer engagements and company gatherings. • What You'll Work On • What You'll Work On • A capability discovery and provisioning system that lets applications find and connect to governed data at deploy time — without hardcoded configuration • Data infrastructure that runs identically in cloud, on-premise, and fully airgapped environments • AI-assisted search across governed mission data — the same RAG pattern proven in production to support of the US Navy Submarine programs, productized and made repeatable • Access control enforcement that is enforced by the platform, not by convention — applications get what they're authorized for and nothing else • 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 ✨🦄 • Amazing To Haves • Amazing To Haves • 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
Benefits
• Health: • Medical/Dental/Vision • Premiums are 100% Company Paid • Health Savings Account • Disability Insurance • Financial: • 401k Retirement Plan • Company Stock Options • Leave: • We offer all full-time Unicorns Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s • Paid Parental Leave • Learning: • Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions • Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees) • Don’t have all the preferred experience or qualifications? Studies show that underrepresented groups like women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs if they don't meet every requirement listed.
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