Senior Data Engineer - AI Data Foundations

Defense Unicorns; Washington (District of Columbia); Remote; USD 149,000 - 201,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Health Savings Account

Life Insurance

Disability Insurance

401k Retirement Plan

Company Stock Options

Home Office Budget

Flexible Time Off

Job summary

Defense Unicorns is seeking a senior Data Engineer to embed with a government team and partners, building an AI-powered engineering ecosystem. The role focuses on making enterprise data usable, governed, and accessible to AI models and mission applications across ingestion, transformation, storage, metadata, APIs, vector and graph tech.

You will design reliable data pipelines, integrate diverse data sources, collaborate with AI engineers on RAG and semantic search, and implement secure data

Qualifications

• Active TS/SCI clearance.
• 7+ years of data engineering experience.
• Proficiency in SQL and Python for data processing and automation.
• Experience building and operating production data pipelines and ETL/ELT workflows.
• Experience with REST APIs, messaging or distributed integrations.
• Knowledge of data modeling, quality, lineage, metadata, and governance concepts.
• Experience in cloud-native or containerized environments with Kubernetes.
• Ability to troubleshoot data issues across infra, apps, APIs, storage, networking and access controls.
• Willingness to work onsite at a government facility in Springfield, VA as needed.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain data pipelines ingesting, transforming, validating, and delivering data for AI models and mission apps.
• Integrate structured and unstructured data sources into enterprise data services (relational, document, vector, graph).
• Collaborate with AI engineers to make data discoverable for RAG, semantic search, and tool-enabled workflows.
• Develop repeatable ingestion and transformation patterns using Python, SQL, APIs, event-driven architectures, and orchestration.
• Establish data quality, provenance, lineage, and metadata practices for trusted data.
• Design data access patterns with proper identity, authorization, classification, and security boundaries.
• Collaborate with platform engineers to operationalize data services in Kubernetes/OpenShift and CI/CD/GitOps.
• Integrate data capabilities (relational, JSON/document, vector, graph, analytics, RAG) into the broader platform.
• Troubleshoot end-to-end data issues across source systems, pipelines, storage, APIs, identity, networking, and services.
• Work with government engineers and partners to resolve data dependencies and unblock mission delivery.
• Develop documentation, contracts, schemas, runbooks, and standards to repeat patterns across environments.
• Identify recurring data engineering challenges to standardize, automate, or productize.

Skills

SQL

Python

ETL/ELT

Data pipelines

Relational DBs

APIs

Data modeling

Kubernetes

Cloud-native

Data governance

Troubleshooting

Independent work

Job description

Defense Unicorns is seeking a senior Data Engineer to embed with a government team and partners, building an AI-powered engineering ecosystem. The role focuses on making enterprise data usable, governed, and accessible to AI models and mission applications across ingestion, transformation, storage, metadata, APIs, vector and graph tech.

You will design reliable data pipelines, integrate diverse data sources, collaborate with AI engineers on RAG and semantic search, and implement secure data