FDE Data Engineer- Space (FedD147)

Defense Unicorns is hiring a forward-deployed data engineer to deploy, integrate, and operate UDS Data Capability in Department of Defense environments. The role supports mission users, builds data integrations and pipelines across classification boundaries, and brings field feedback back to product and engineering.

Responsibilities:

• Deploy and configure 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
• Build and support integrations with existing mission systems. Connect UDS Data Capability to legacy databases, flat-file drops, SOAP/REST endpoints, message buses, existing object storage, and identity providers (Keycloak, mission-side SSO). Prior experience integrating with these types of systems is more relevant than experience building on them
• Contribute to mapping complex data landscapes. Some engagements involve hundreds of interconnected systems of record with overlapping schemas and deeply interdependent data flows. You'll help trace how data moves across systems and identify dependencies alongside senior engineers and government stakeholders
• Build pipelines that move data through classification boundaries, including ingestion, transformation, catalog registration, model/dataset packaging via Zarf, cross-domain transit, and eventual consistency across DDIL conditions
• Implement data provenance, lineage, and governance practices. Track where data came from, how it transformed, and who can access it
• Operate what you deploy. Day-2 ownership includes capacity, performance, backup/restore (Velero), observability (Vector/Loki), incident response, and upgrade paths. Hand off to the mission hero's ops team once it's stable
• Generate accreditation artifacts, including STIG evidence, cATO documentation, FIPS validation notes, and policy mappings. You produce the evidence the mission hero's ISSM/ISSO needs to run this in IL4/IL5
• Contribute field feedback back to product and engineering. File issues, write postmortems, and surface what's working and what's breaking in the mission environment
• Support training and knowledge transfer. Contribute to runbooks, architecture docs, and working sessions that leave the mission hero's team self-sufficient

Requirements:

• EMPLOYER IS A CONTRACTOR FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. THIS POSITION WILL REQUIRE U.S. CITIZENSHIP.
• Experience storing and querying large unstructured datasets using data lake architectures
• Experience with stream processing infrastructure (Kafka, Redpanda, Flink, or equivalent) and bridging data from heterogeneous sources into modern pipelines
• Open-source data warehousing platform experience
• Airflow, Dagster, Argo Workflows, or similar. Comfort building, scheduling, monitoring, and recovering production data pipelines
• Fluent in SQL. Comfortable designing schemas for both analytical and operational workloads
• Open-source orientation. You are comfortable building on open-source tooling and contributing back to it
• U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance
• Comfort working directly with mission heroes and government stakeholders. Clear communication with both technical and non-technical audiences
• Bias toward delivery. Preference for shipping a working integration over perfecting a design that hasn't met a real workload
• Self-direction. You will encounter environments and problems that are not yet documented and will need to work through them independently
• Spark experience
• Experience with lineage tracking, data catalogs, provenance systems, or governance frameworks
• DoD or defense program experience
• Active Secret clearance (or higher)
• Apache Iceberg (or Delta/Hudi), object storage (Ceph/S3-compatible), Postgres (including extensions like pgvector), columnar/OLAP engines (Trino, DuckDB, ClickHouse, Spark SQL)
• Debezium or similar CDC patterns
• REST catalogs (Iceberg REST, Polaris/Gravitino/Nessie family), ABAC/RBAC patterns, OIDC/OAuth, lineage and audit
• general familiarity with deployments, operators, and how applications run on Kubernetes
• Linux fundamentals, container runtime behavior, networking, TLS, secrets management
• Terraform, Pulumi, or similar and GitOps patterns (Flux, ArgoCD)
• Familiarity with the CNCF ecosystem, including the distinction between foundation projects and single-vendor projects
• General understanding of how data infrastructure supports model training, versioning, provenance, and AI operations
• Familiarity with Air Force or Space Force systems of record (e.g., MILPDS, ARMS) and how data flows between them