Senior Data Engineer: Secure AI Data Foundations

Defense Unicorns; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

401k Retirement Plan

Company Stock Options

Home Office Budget

Paid Holidays

Parental Leave

Learning reimbursements

Job summary

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to embed with a government team and partners, building an AI-powered engineering ecosystem. You will own end-to-end data lifecycle, making data reliable, secured, and ready for AI workloads in a mission-critical environment.

The role involves ingesting, transforming, storing, and provisioning data across relational, document, vector, and graph stores, plus ensuring governance, provenance, and security.

Qualifications

• Active TS/SCI clearance.
• 7+ years in data engineering or related field.
• Strong proficiency with SQL and Python for data processing, automation, and integration.
• Hands-on experience building and operating production data pipelines and ETL/ELT workflows.
• Experience with relational databases and modern data storage patterns for structured and unstructured data.
• Experience integrating data through REST APIs, message/event systems, or other distributed integration patterns.
• Knowledge of data modeling, schema design, data quality, lineage, metadata, and governance concepts.
• Experience operating in cloud-native or containerized environments and collaborating with Kubernetes/platform engineering teams.
• Ability to troubleshoot data issues across infrastructure, applications, APIs, storage, networking, and access controls.
• Ability to work independently, rapidly learn new technologies, and translate ambiguous mission needs into working data solutions.
• Local to the National Capital Region and onsite Springfield, VA as needed.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain reliable data pipelines for AI models, agents, and mission apps.
• Integrate structured and unstructured data sources into enterprise data services.
• Collaborate with AI/agent engineers to enable RAG, semantic search, and tool-enabled workflows.
• Develop repeatable ingestion and transformation patterns using Python, SQL, APIs, and event-driven architectures.
• Establish data quality, provenance, lineage, and metadata practices for trust.
• Design data access patterns with proper identity, authorization, and security boundaries.
• Work with platform engineers to operationalize data services in Kubernetes/OpenShift and CI/CD workflows.
• Integrate data capabilities like relational stores, JSON/document data, vector search, and graphs into the platform.
• Troubleshoot end-to-end data issues across source systems, pipelines, storage, APIs, and AI apps.
• Collaborate with government engineers and partners to resolve data dependencies and blockers.
• Develop documentation, data contracts, schemas, runbooks, and standards for repeatable patterns.
• Identify recurring data engineering challenges that can be standardized or automated.
• Operate in a fast-moving, evolving environment.

Skills

SQL

Python

Data pipelines

ETL/ELT

Data governance

Cloud native

Security/compliance

Tools

PostgreSQL/MySQL

REST APIs

Kubernetes

OpenShift

Airflow

Dagster

Kafka

Job description

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to embed with a government team and partners, building an AI-powered engineering ecosystem. You will own end-to-end data lifecycle, making data reliable, secured, and ready for AI workloads in a mission-critical environment.

The role involves ingesting, transforming, storing, and provisioning data across relational, document, vector, and graph stores, plus ensuring governance, provenance, and security.