Senior Data Engineer
Defense Unicorns1 month ago
Washington, DC, USASenior
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain reliable data pipelines for AI models, agents, and mission applications.
- Integrate relational, document, vector, and graph-oriented data sources into enterprise data services.
- Develop ingestion and transformation patterns using Python, SQL, APIs, event-driven architectures, and orchestration technologies.
- Establish data quality, validation, provenance, lineage, metadata, schemas, data contracts, and governance practices.
- Design secure data access patterns enforcing identity, authorization, classification, and security boundaries.
- Operationalize data services in Kubernetes/OpenShift environments and integrate them with GitOps and automated delivery workflows.
- Troubleshoot end-to-end issues spanning source systems, pipelines, storage, APIs, identity, networking, platform services, and AI applications.
- Collaborate directly with government engineers, commercial technology partners, and platform teams to resolve data dependencies.
- Create documentation, architecture decision records, runbooks, and operational standards.
- Standardize, automate, and productize recurring data engineering challenges for repeatable mission delivery.
Requirements
- Active TS/SCI clearance is required.
- At least 7 years of experience in data engineering, data platform engineering, or a closely related field is required.
- Strong proficiency with SQL and Python is required.
- Hands-on experience building and operating production data pipelines and ETL/ELT workflows is required.
- Experience with relational databases and structured and unstructured data storage patterns is required.
- Experience integrating data through APIs, message or event systems, or distributed integration patterns is required.
- Working knowledge of data modeling, schema design, data quality, lineage, metadata, and governance is required.
- Experience with cloud-native or containerized environments and Kubernetes platform teams is required.
- Ability to troubleshoot across infrastructure, applications, APIs, storage, networking, and access controls is required.
- Ability to work independently, learn unfamiliar technologies quickly, and translate ambiguous mission needs into working solutions is required.
- Local presence in the National Capital Region and ability to support onsite work at a government facility in Springfield, Virginia are required.
- Preferred experience includes AI/ML workloads, RAG, embeddings, vector search, model context, agentic applications, vector databases, graph databases, document databases, knowledge graphs, and semantic search.
- Preferred experience includes Oracle or comparable enterprise data platforms, Airflow, Dagster, Argo Workflows, Kafka, Redpanda, NATS, Kubernetes, Helm, GitOps, infrastructure as code, and automated delivery pipelines.
- Preferred experience includes Secret or TS/SCI environments, disconnected or air-gapped environments, NIST 800-53, RMF/ATO, zero-trust architectures, enterprise search, data catalogs, data contracts, and knowledge graphs.
- Familiarity with UDS, Zarf, Pepr, Iron Bank, or similar secure software delivery technologies is preferred.
- Experience working with government engineers, FDEs, OEM professional services teams, and technology vendors is preferred.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance with premiums 100% company paid.
- Health savings account, life insurance, and disability insurance.
- 401(k) retirement plan, company stock options, and home office budget.
- Flexible Time Off, federal holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year's.
- Paid parental leave.
- Reimbursement for approved training and subscriptions.
- Conference support including travel, lodging, and fees.
- The role is local to the National Capital Region and may require increasing onsite work at a government facility in Springfield, Virginia.
Tech Stack
Categories
Data Engineering
About Defense Unicorns
Defense Unicorns builds platform software and services that streamline secure, cloud-native delivery for defense and federal programs, with emphasis on DevSecOps, Kubernetes, and air‑gapped environments. It provides software and professional services under government contracts to deploy open-architecture platforms and CI/CD pipelines across classified and disconnected systems. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Colorado Springs, the privately held company serves U.S. defense and national security agencies.