Forward-Deployed Data Engineer for DoD Missions

Defenseunicorns; United States; Hybrid; USD 123,250 - 166,750; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401k plan

Stock options

Home office budget

Flexible time off

Job summary

Defense Unicorns is seeking a forward-deployed data engineer to deploy and operate a data capability in DoD environments. You will work remotely with mission heroes, traveling for engagement standups, integrations, and key trainings as needed.

You will build end-to-end data pipelines, implement governance and provenance, and collaborate with government stakeholders to ensure secure, production-ready deployments across classified environments.

Qualifications

• Experience storing and querying large unstructured datasets using data lake architectures. Spark experience preferred.
• 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; comfortable building without proprietary platforms.
• Airflow, Dagster, Argo Workflows, or similar for building, scheduling, monitoring, and recovering production data pipelines.
• Fluent in SQL and comfortable designing schemas for analytical and operational workloads.

Responsibilities

• Deploy and configure UDS Data Capability in the mission hero's environment and stand up the UDS Store, wire up UDS Transit, configure UDS Govern policies, and integrate UDS Connect where streaming or legacy connectors are required.
• Build and support integrations with existing mission systems and connect to legacy databases, flat-file drops, SOAP/REST endpoints, message buses, and identity providers.
• Contribute to mapping complex data landscapes and trace data movement across interconnected systems with senior engineers and government stakeholders.
• Build pipelines that move data through classification boundaries: ingestion, transformation, catalog registration, model/dataset packaging, cross-domain transit, and eventual consistency across DDIL conditions.
• Implement data provenance, lineage, and governance practices and track data origins, transformations, and access.
• Operate what you deploy: capacity, performance, backup/restore, observability, incident response, and upgrade paths, handing off to the mission hero's ops team.
• Generate accreditation artifacts (STIG, cATO docs, FIPS notes, policy mappings) for IL4/IL5 run readiness.
• Contribute feedback to product/engineering, file issues, write postmortems, and surface what works/breaks in the mission environment.
• Support training and knowledge transfer with runbooks, architecture docs, and workshops.

Skills

Unstructured data at scale

Streaming & integration

Data warehousing

Pipelines & orchestration

Data modeling & SQL

Tools

Kafka

Iceberg

Postgres

pgvector

Trino

Job description

Defense Unicorns is seeking a forward-deployed data engineer to deploy and operate a data capability in DoD environments. You will work remotely with mission heroes, traveling for engagement standups, integrations, and key trainings as needed.

You will build end-to-end data pipelines, implement governance and provenance, and collaborate with government stakeholders to ensure secure, production-ready deployments across classified environments.