Senior Forward-Deployed Engineer, C-UAS (Remote)

Devconnectplatform; United States; Remote; USD 149,000 - 201,000; Full time

Job summary

Defense Unicorns seeks a Senior Forward-Deployed Engineer to design and operate a modular C-UAS data integration platform in DoD environments. You will deploy, secure, and scale data pipelines across air-gapped and connected systems, coordinating with mission operators and product teams.

Expect remote work with site visits and strong emphasis on accreditation and training. Role requires TS/SCI, hands-on data engineering, and deep experience with modern data lakehouse tech, streaming, and IaC.

Qualifications

• Active TS/SCI clearance required for DoD environment work.
• Production experience with modern data platforms and lakehouse techs.
• Hands-on experience with streaming data and CDC integrations.
• Proficient in SQL and data modeling for analytical/operational workloads.
• Strong Linux, containerization, networking, TLS, and secret management.
• Experience with Airflow, Dagster, Argo for orchestration.

Responsibilities

• Deploy and harden UDS Data Capability in the mission hero's environment.
• Integrate UDS Data Capability with existing sensor arrays and C-UAS solutions.
• Build data pipelines across ingestion, transformation, and cataloging.
• Manage day-2 operations: capacity, backup/restore, observability, incident response.
• Generate accreditation artifacts (STIG, cATO, FIPS) and policy mappings.
• Document issues, write postmortems, and communicate field challenges.
• Mentor junior Data Engineer FDEs and transfer knowledge.

Skills

Data pipeline engineering

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

Apache Iceberg / data lakehouse

Streaming data (Kafka)

Linux

Security compliance (STIG, FIPS)

Cloud / on-prem integration

Terraform / IaC

Observability tools (Vector, Loki)

Tools

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Strimzi/Kafka

Velero

pgvector

Iceberg REST / Polaris

Terraform

Job description

Defense Unicorns seeks a Senior Forward-Deployed Engineer to design and operate a modular C-UAS data integration platform in DoD environments. You will deploy, secure, and scale data pipelines across air-gapped and connected systems, coordinating with mission operators and product teams.

Expect remote work with site visits and strong emphasis on accreditation and training. Role requires TS/SCI, hands-on data engineering, and deep experience with modern data lakehouse tech, streaming, and IaC.