Associate Engineer - Data Platform

Defense Unicorns is seeking an Associate Engineer who is energized by learning and motivated by ensuring software functionality. The role involves packaging and deploying open source software, writing test suites, and contributing to internal tooling and documentation.

Responsibilities:

• Write and maintain test suites — integration, end-to-end, and regression — that give the team confidence to ship
• Write automated tests and test documentation that any engineer can reproduce and act on
• Package and deploy open source software components in Kubernetes environments
• Build and maintain seed data tooling and scripts that make the platform demonstrable from scratch
• Contribute to internal tooling, dashboards, and documentation
• Write clear bug reports and reproduction steps that the team can act on immediately
• Participate actively in code review, seeking feedback, and growing your technical judgment

Requirements:

• Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related technical field — or equivalent demonstrated hands-on technical ability
• Active and effective user of AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor, or similar) — you know how to prompt well, validate output, and catch when the model is wrong
• An orientation toward testing and validation — you find satisfaction in knowing that something works, not just that it runs; you break things intentionally and document what you find
• U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain a security clearance
• Comfort with at least one programming language — Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar; willingness to learn what the stack requires
• Genuine curiosity about how distributed systems work and fail — you want to understand the system, not just run scripts against it
• Comfort with command-line tooling and Linux environments
• Ability to write clearly: bug reports, documentation, and runbooks that another engineer can follow
• Comfortable working asynchronously in a remote environment ✨🦄