Senior Data Engineer - Secure AI Data Pipelines

Defense Unicorns; Springfield (VA); Remote; CAD 212,000 - 286,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/Dental/Vision

Company paid premiums

Health Savings Account

Life Insurance

Disability Insurance

401k Retirement Plan

Company Stock Options

Home Office Budget

Flexible Time Off

Paid Parental Leave

Conferences (travel, lodging, fees)

Job summary

Defense Unicorns is recruiting a Senior Data Engineer to embed with a government team and partners, building an AI-enabled data platform. You will own end-to-end data pipelines, ingestion, transformation, and governance to support AI models and mission applications.

You will collaborate with AI/agent engineers, focus on trusted data access, and operate across secure, classified environments with modern data services and Kubernetes-based platforms.

Qualifications

• Active TS/SCI clearance.
• 7+ years in data engineering or a closely 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.
• Working knowledge of data modeling, schema design, data quality, lineage, metadata, and data 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.
• Onsite support in Springfield, VA as mission needs increase.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain reliable data pipelines that ingest, transform, validate, and deliver data for AI models, agents, and mission applications.
• Integrate structured and unstructured data sources into enterprise data services, including relational, document, vector, and graph-oriented technologies.
• Work closely with AI/agent engineers to make data discoverable and usable for RAG, semantic search, model context, and tool-enabled agent workflows.
• Develop repeatable data ingestion and transformation patterns using Python, SQL, APIs, event-driven architectures, and workflow/orchestration technologies.
• Establish data quality, validation, provenance, lineage, and metadata practices so downstream users and AI systems can trust the information they consume.
• Design data access patterns that enforce identity, authorization, classification, and security boundaries while minimizing friction for developers and mission users.

Skills

SQL

Python

Data pipelines

ETL/ELT

Kubernetes

APIs

Data modeling

Data governance

Tools

Airflow

Dagster

Argo Workflows

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Helm

Job description

Defense Unicorns is recruiting a Senior Data Engineer to embed with a government team and partners, building an AI-enabled data platform. You will own end-to-end data pipelines, ingestion, transformation, and governance to support AI models and mission applications.

You will collaborate with AI/agent engineers, focus on trusted data access, and operate across secure, classified environments with modern data services and Kubernetes-based platforms.