Senior FDE Data Engineer

Role Overview

• 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

• Data engineering breadth
• Lakehouse & storage — 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).
• Streaming & integration — Kafka (preferably Strimzi on Kubernetes), Flink or equivalent stream processing, CDC patterns (Debezium), and the ability to bridge legacy systems (Oracle, SQL Server, flat files, SOAP) into modern pipelines.
• Pipelines & orchestration — Airflow, Dagster, Argo Workflows, or similar; comfort building, scheduling, monitoring, and recovering production data pipelines.
• Governance, catalog & access — REST catalogs (Iceberg REST, Polaris/Gravitino/Nessie family), ABAC/RBAC patterns, OIDC/OAuth, lineage and audit.
• Data modeling & SQL — fluent in SQL; comfortable designing schemas for both analytical and operational workloads.
• Kubernetes in production — deployments, operators, CRDs, storage classes, networking. You don't have to write controllers from scratch, but you can read and debug them.
• Linux fundamentals, container runtime behavior, networking, TLS, secrets management.
• IaC (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) and GitOps patterns (Flux, ArgoCD).
• Familiarity with the CNCF ecosystem — what's a foundation project, what's a single-vendor project, why it matters.
• Active DoD security clearance required — TS/SCI preferred; minimum active Secret with the ability to obtain TS/SCI.
• Comfort being the technical face of Defense Unicorns to a mission hero — listening before prescribing, writing clearly, briefing technical and non-technical stakeholders, and saying "I don't know yet, let me find out" without losing the room.
• Comfort with on-site work when the engagement calls for it — in SCIFs and other restricted spaces, sometimes for days or weeks — and equal comfort doing the rest of the work remotely without losing the relationship.
• Bias toward delivery. You'd rather ship a working integration with rough edges than a perfect design that hasn't met a real workload.
• Self-direction. The mission hero's environment will surprise you, and the answer often isn't in the documentation yet — you'll write it.
• The maturity to mentor without hovering. Junior engineers grow by doing

Tech Stack

• Airflow
• Apache
• Flux
• Kafka
• Kubernetes
• Linux
• Oracle
• Postgres
• SOAP
• Spark
• SQL
• Terraform
• TypeScript

Benefits

• Medical/Dental/Vision
• Premiums are 100% Company Paid
• Health Savings Account
• Life Insurance
• Disability Insurance
• 401k Retirement Plan
• Company Stock Options
• Home Office Budget
• 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
• Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
• Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)