Remote Forward-Deployed Data Engineer for DoD Missions

Bazeta; Colorado Springs, Melbourne (CO, FL); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Defense Unicorns seeks a Senior Data Engineer to deploy and operate a distributed data capability in DoD environments. You will work remotely with mission heroes, deploying data stores, streaming, and governance components while coordinating with government stakeholders.

You will build end-to-end data pipelines, perform data provenance, and enable cross-domain data movement, ensuring reliability and security in complex, constrained settings. Some travel to sites may be required.

Qualifications

• Experience storing and querying large unstructured datasets using data lake architectures.
• Streaming infrastructure experience (Kafka, Redpanda, Flink or equivalent) and bridging data from heterogeneous sources.
• Open-source data warehousing experience without proprietary platforms.
• Experience building and monitoring production data pipelines with Airflow or similar tooling.
• Fluent SQL and data modeling skills for analytical and operational workloads.

Responsibilities

• Deploy and operate a data capability in DoD environments, including data ingestion, governance, and cataloging.
• Build pipelines across classification boundaries with cross-domain transit and eventual consistency.
• Integrate with legacy systems and established mission systems and identity providers.
• Establish data provenance, lineage, and governance practices; maintain security controls and incident response.
• Contribute to runbooks, architecture docs, and knowledge transfer sessions with the mission team.

Skills

Data lake architectures

Spark processing

Streaming integration

SQL proficiency

Open-source tooling

Security clearance readiness

Tools

Kafka

Spark

Flink

Airflow

Job description

Defense Unicorns seeks a Senior Data Engineer to deploy and operate a distributed data capability in DoD environments. You will work remotely with mission heroes, deploying data stores, streaming, and governance components while coordinating with government stakeholders.

You will build end-to-end data pipelines, perform data provenance, and enable cross-domain data movement, ensuring reliability and security in complex, constrained settings. Some travel to sites may be required.