Senior Data Engineer | TS/SCI | AI Data Pipelines (Remote)

AVP; Springfield (VA); Remote; USD 149,000 - 201,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/Dental/Vision

Company Paid Premiums

401k Retirement Plan

Stock Options

Home Office Budget

Paid Parental Leave

Job summary

Defense Unicorns seeks a Senior Data Engineer to embed with a government team, building an AI-powered data foundation across ingestion, transformation, storage, and metadata services. You will enable RAG, semantic search, and secure, scalable data access in complex, classified environments.

The role emphasizes hands-on data engineering across the full lifecycle, collaborating with partners, and delivering repeatable data patterns for mission-focused AI workloads.

Qualifications

• Active TS/SCI clearance.
• 7+ years in data engineering or related field.
• Strong SQL and Python proficiency.
• Hands-on with production data pipelines and ETL/ELT.
• Experience with relational DBs and modern storage patterns.
• REST APIs and distributed integration patterns.
• Cloud-native or containerized environments; Kubernetes exposure.
• Troubleshoot data issues across infra, apps, APIs, storage, networking, access controls.
• Ability to learn quickly and translate mission needs into data solutions.
• Onsite readiness in Springfield, VA when required.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain reliable data pipelines for AI models and mission apps.
• Integrate structured and unstructured data into enterprise data services.
• Collaborate with AI engineers for data discoverability and usage in RAG and semantic search.
• Develop repeatable ingestion/transformation patterns using Python, SQL, APIs, events, and orchestration.
• Establish data quality, provenance, lineage, and metadata practices.
• Design data access patterns with proper identity, authorization, and security boundaries.
• Collaborate with platform engineers to deploy data services in Kubernetes/OpenShift and CI/CD workflows.
• Incorporate relational, JSON/document, vector, and graph data into platform architecture.
• Troubleshoot end-to-end data issues across sources, pipelines, storage, APIs, and networks.
• Work with government engineers and partners to remove blockers to mission delivery.
• Develop docs, data contracts, schemas, runbooks, and standards for repeatable patterns.
• Identify recurring challenges to standardize or productize data engineering tasks.
• Operate effectively in fast-moving, evolving security environments.

Skills

SQL

Python

ETL/ELT

Data pipelines

Kubernetes

Security/compliance

Tools

Airflow

Dagster

Argo

Kafka

NATS

GitOps

Job description

Defense Unicorns seeks a Senior Data Engineer to embed with a government team, building an AI-powered data foundation across ingestion, transformation, storage, and metadata services. You will enable RAG, semantic search, and secure, scalable data access in complex, classified environments.

The role emphasizes hands-on data engineering across the full lifecycle, collaborating with partners, and delivering repeatable data patterns for mission-focused AI workloads.