Forward-Deployed C-UAS Engineer (Remote)

Defense Unicorns; Colorado Springs (CO); Remote; USD 149,000 - 201,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401k Retirement Plan

Company Stock Options

Home Office Budget

Health Insurance

Job summary

Defense Unicorns is hiring a forward-deployed data engineering leader to deploy, secure, and operate a modular C-UAS data integration platform for DoD use. You will interface with mission heroes, architect end-to-end data flows, and ensure secure, resilient operations in constrained environments.

You will mentor junior engineers, drive improvements, and coordinate with product and engineering to address field challenges while traveling 10–25% as required. Remote-USA work is available.

Qualifications

• Experience with tactical edge environments including TAK Server administration and ATAK/WinTAK.
• Experience with production data platforms and lakehouse tech like Iceberg, Delta Lake or Hudi.
• Experience with streaming data and Kafka-based integration.
• Hands-on with orchestration: Airflow, Dagster, Argo.
• Knowledge of data governance, RBAC/ABAC and OIDC/OAuth.
• Strong SQL and data modeling for analytical/operational workloads.
• Kubernetes production experience, including deployments and CRDs.
• Linux, containers, TLS, and secrets management fundamentals.
• IaC and GitOps (Terraform, Pulumi) practices.
• Mentoring engineers on technical problem solving.

Responsibilities

• Deploy and harden UDS Data Capability in the mission hero's environment.
• Own integration with existing mission systems and data pipelines.
• Build data pipelines crossing classification boundaries and ensure eventual consistency.
• Operate deployments: capacity, backups, observability, incident response, upgrades.
• Produce accreditation artifacts and support STIG/cATO processes.
• Represent users to product and engineering, document issues and improvements.
• Train and transfer knowledge with runbooks and architecture docs.
• Mentor junior Data Engineers on complex problems.

Skills

Strong communication

Independent work

Travel readiness

Remote work capable

Problem solving

Tools

TAK Server

ATAK/WinTAK

Kafka

Iceberg

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

Pulumi

Job description

Defense Unicorns is hiring a forward-deployed data engineering leader to deploy, secure, and operate a modular C-UAS data integration platform for DoD use. You will interface with mission heroes, architect end-to-end data flows, and ensure secure, resilient operations in constrained environments.

You will mentor junior engineers, drive improvements, and coordinate with product and engineering to address field challenges while traveling 10–25% as required. Remote-USA work is available.