Senior Data Engineer (FedD238)

The posting, as Defense Unicorns wrote it

Role Description

Defense Unicorns is seeking a senior Data Engineer to embed with a government team and its technology partners building an emerging AI-powered engineering ecosystem.

This role will focus on making enterprise data usable, discoverable, governed, and accessible to AI models, agents, and mission applications. The engineer will work across data ingestion, transformation, storage, metadata, APIs, search, vector and graph technologies, and the interfaces between the data layer and AI workloads.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on data engineer who can operate across the full data lifecycle and understands that data availability and integration are often the primary blockers to delivering AI capabilities. They should be comfortable entering an evolving architecture, learning unfamiliar systems quickly, working directly with commercial technology partners, and solving difficult problems involving data quality, lineage, access, performance, and security.

This is not a traditional analytics or business intelligence role. The focus is on building the data foundations and repeatable patterns that allow AI and agentic capabilities to access trusted data and move from prototype to production in secure and classified environments.

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 appropriate identity, authorization, classification, and security boundaries while minimizing unnecessary friction for developers and mission users.
• Collaborate with platform engineers to operationalize data services within Kubernetes/OpenShift environments and integrate them into CI/CD and GitOps workflows.
• Help integrate enterprise data capabilities such as relational stores, JSON/document data, vector search, graph data, advanced analytics, and RAG services into the broader platform architecture.
• Troubleshoot end-to-end data issues spanning source systems, pipelines, storage, APIs, identity, networking, platform services, and AI applications.
• Work directly with government engineers and commercial technology partners to resolve data dependencies and remove blockers to mission delivery.
• Develop documentation, data contracts, schemas, architecture decision records, run

[…]
oudly support defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products.

What We Work On

• Kubernetes
• Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
• Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
• Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
• GitOps
• Containers
• CNCF projects and open source products and packages
• Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
• Building and improving security delivery
• Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications

Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy

Health

• Medical/Dental/Vision
• Premiums are 100% Company Paid
• Health Savings Account
• Life Insurance
• Disability Insurance

Financial

• 401k Retirement Plan
• Company Stock Options
• Home Office Budget

Leave

• We offer all full-time Unicorns Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s
• Paid Parental Leave

Learning

• Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
• Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)

Don’t have all the preferred experience or qualifications? Studies show that underrepresented groups like women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs if they don't meet every requirement listed.

At Defense Unicorns, we're committed to diversity. If you're enthusiastic about the role but don't match every criteria, we encourage you to apply. You could be the perfect fit for this or another role! Defense Unicorns is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, union status and/or beliefs, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.

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