[All remote jobs](https://jobicy.com/jobs.md)[![Defense Unicorns logo](https://jobicy.com/data/server-nyc0409/galaxy/mercury/2025/06/44a44784-221-1.png)](https://jobicy.com/company/defense-unicorns.md)[Defense Unicorns](https://jobicy.com/company/defense-unicorns.md) # FDE Data Engineer- Space (FedD141/FedD147) Review the role, location requirements, compensation details, and application process before deciding whether this opportunity fits your next career move. [Apply for this job](#job-application)[View company](https://jobicy.com/company/defense-unicorns.md)ShareRemote from[USA](https://jobicy.com/job-region/usa.md)SalaryUSD 123,250–166,750 / yrDepartment[Data Science & Analytics](https://jobicy.com/categories/data-science.md)EmploymentFull TimeExperienceSeniorPublished29 Sep 2026Apply before29 Oct 2026Listing views55Application actions2Application toolkit ## Make your next move. Prepare your resume, explore your fit, and draft a cover letter for this opportunity. AI Summary ## The role, at a glance. Defense Unicorns is seeking a forward-deployed Data Engineer to deploy, integrate, and operate a secure data platform in U.S. Department of Defense environments. The role spans data-lake storage, streaming, ingestion, orchestration, governance, lineage, access controls, and production operations across classified or constrained environments. The engineer will integrate heterogeneous legacy systems, create accreditation evidence, support incident response and knowledge transfer, and bring field lessons back to product engineering. This is a remote U.S. role with periodic travel, with local presence preferred near Colorado Springs or Florida's Space Coast. U.S. citizenship and eligibility to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance are required. ## Role DNA A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description. ### Job Complexity 5/5EasyHard ### Pace & Pressure 4/5RelaxedFast-paced ### Autonomy Level 5/5GuidedFull ownership ### Communication Load 5/5IndependentCollaborative AI insightThis is a technically demanding forward-deployed role involving complex government data ecosystems, air-gapped and classified deployments, production reliability, and compliance artifacts. Success requires broad data-platform expertise plus the ability to independently solve poorly documented integration problems with government and technical stakeholders. ## Salary analysis Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles. Estimated job medianMarket rate$145,000US market range$125k–$175k0$193k AI insightThe disclosed annual USD range is $123,250 to $166,750, producing a midpoint salary of $145,000. The estimated U.S. market range for a mid-to-senior forward-deployed data engineer with secure-platform, Kubernetes, and defense-domain responsibilities is approximately $125,000 to $175,000 annually; the advertised range is competitive within that market. ## Core skills Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity. [Data Engineering](https://jobicy.com/jobs?search_keywords=Data%20Engineering.md)[Apache Iceberg](https://jobicy.com/jobs?search_keywords=Apache%20Iceberg.md)[Kafka](https://jobicy.com/jobs?search_keywords=Kafka.md)[Data Pipelines](https://jobicy.com/jobs?search_keywords=Data%20Pipelines.md)[SQL](https://jobicy.com/jobs?search_keywords=SQL.md)[Data Governance](https://jobicy.com/jobs?search_keywords=Data%20Governance.md)[Data Lineage](https://jobicy.com/jobs?search_keywords=Data%20Lineage.md)[Kubernetes](https://jobicy.com/jobs?search_keywords=Kubernetes.md)[PostgreSQL](https://jobicy.com/jobs?search_keywords=PostgreSQL.md)[DoD Security Clearance](https://jobicy.com/jobs?search_keywords=DoD%20Security%20Clearance.md) Sample interview questionsDescribe a data platform you deployed or operated in a constrained, regulated, or mission-critical environment.I would explain the platform architecture, the security and operational constraints, and how I delivered a usable initial capability. I would highlight choices around storage, ingestion, access controls, observability, backup and recovery, and the measurable reliability or user outcomes achieved. How would you integrate legacy databases, flat files, SOAP/REST services, and message buses into a governed lakehouse platform? I would begin with source discovery, ownership, data contracts, classification, and refresh requirements. I would use appropriate batch, CDC, API, or streaming patterns; establish schema validation and metadata capture; then register datasets in a catalog with lineage, retention, and role-based or attribute-based access policies. How would you design for data movement across classification boundaries and DDIL conditions? I would segment the architecture by trust boundary, define approved transfer mechanisms and policy controls, and make package integrity and auditability first-class concerns. I would design pipelines to tolerate intermittent connectivity through idempotent transfers, checkpoints, retries, reconciliation, and clear provenance records. What practices would you use to maintain provenance, lineage, and auditability for data products? I would capture source identifiers, ingestion timestamps, schema versions, transformation code versions, quality results, and access events in centralized metadata systems. I would connect orchestration runs and catalog entries to datasets so operators and auditors can trace an output back to its source and transformation history. A deployed pipeline is falling behind and users report stale data. How would you respond? I would first assess impact, freshness objectives, backlog size, and recent infrastructure or schema changes using dashboards and logs. I would stabilize the service through capacity adjustments, backpressure controls, replay-safe recovery, or source throttling as appropriate, then document root cause, corrective actions, and prevention measures in a postmortem. Opportunity details ## About this role. ### EMPLOYER IS A CONTRACTOR FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. THIS POSITION WILL REQUIRE U.S. CITIZENSHIP. ### Role Description This is a forward-deployed engineering role. You’ll work shoulder-to-shoulder with mission heroes: the users, operators, and program engineers who run real workloads in real DoD environments. You’ll help take UDS Data Capability from “deployable” to “running in production under classification.” You will deploy, integrate, and operate our data stack in the mission hero’s environment alongside senior engineers, then carry what you learn back into the product so the next engagement is easier. The scope of this work varies by engagement. Some programs require standing up a governed data platform to centralize sensor or operational data from known sources, where the problem is well-defined and the priority is building and shipping. Others involve consolidating data across hundreds of interconnected government systems of record with overlapping schemas, deeply interdependent data flows, and significant architectural complexity. You should be comfortable building independently against defined problems and growing into more ambiguous, complex engagements over time. Forward-deployed means aligned with the mission hero, not always on a plane. Most of the work is remote. You’ll travel to sites when the engagement calls for it: initial standup, integration work, incident response, training and knowledge transfer. The rest of the time, you’ll be on a video call or in a shared chat with that same mission hero. The role is defined by the relationship with the mission hero, not by where you sit. You are a data engineer who can build across the breadth of a data platform (storage, ingestion, streaming, governance, and access) and deliver working solutions in constrained, mission-critical environments. ### Responsibilities * Deploy and configure UDS Data Capability in the mission hero’s environment. Stand up the UDS Store (Iceberg, Rook/Ceph, pgvector, Postgres), wire up UDS Transit for air-gap data movement, configure UDS Govern policies (Pepr/Lula), and integrate UDS Connect (Strimzi/Kafka) where streaming or legacy connectors are required. * Build and support integrations with existing mission systems. Connect UDS Data Capability to legacy databases, flat-file drops, SOAP/REST endpoints, message buses, existing object storage, and identity providers (Keycloak, mission-side SSO). Prior experience integrating with these types of systems is more relevant than experience building on them. * Contribute to mapping complex data landscapes. Some engagements involve hundreds of interconnected systems of record with overlapping schemas and deeply interdependent data flows. You’ll help trace how data moves across systems and identify dependencies alongside senior engineers and government stakeholders. * Build pipelines that move data through classification boundaries, including ingestion, transformation, catalog registration, model/dataset packaging via Zarf, cross-domain transit, and eventual consistency across DDIL conditions. * Implement data provenance, lineage, and governance practices. Track where data came from, how it transformed, and who can access it. * Operate what you deploy. Day-2 ownership includes capacity, performance, backup/restore (Velero), observability (Vector/Loki), incident response, and upgrade paths. Hand off to the mission hero’s ops team once it’s stable. * Generate accreditation artifacts, including STIG evidence, cATO documentation, FIPS validation notes, and policy mappings. You produce the evidence the mission hero’s ISSM/ISSO needs to run this in IL4/IL5. * Contribute field feedback back to product and engineering. File issues, write postmortems, and surface what’s working and what’s breaking in the mission environment. * Support training and knowledge transfer. Contribute to runbooks, architecture docs, and working sessions that leave the mission hero’s team self-sufficient. Preferred Locations: Colorado Springs, CO or Florida Space Coast (Cape Canaveral / Cocoa Beach / Melbourne). Remote candidates will be considered, but local presence is strongly preferred. Travel Expectations: Candidates based in Colorado Springs or the Florida Space Coast can expect on-site presence 1-2 days per week. Remote candidates should expect to travel to the engagement site for approximately one week every 4-6 weeks. The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving needs of the organization. We are seeking a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise. ### Required Qualifications Data engineering breadth * Unstructured data at scale. Experience storing and querying large unstructured datasets using data lake architectures. Spark experience preferred. * Streaming & integration. Experience with stream processing infrastructure (Kafka, Redpanda, Flink, or equivalent) and bridging data from heterogeneous sources into modern pipelines. * Data warehousing. Open-source data warehousing platform experience. These environments do not support proprietary platforms, so you need to be comfortable building without them. * Pipelines & orchestration. Airflow, Dagster, Argo Workflows, or similar. Comfort building, scheduling, monitoring, and recovering production data pipelines. * Data modeling & SQL. Fluent in SQL. Comfortable designing schemas for both analytical and operational workloads. Open-source orientation. You are comfortable building on open-source tooling and contributing back to it. What “forward-deployed” requires * U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance. Clearance sponsorship available for the right candidate. * Comfort working directly with mission heroes and government stakeholders. Clear communication with both technical and non-technical audiences. * Comfort with periodic on-site work, sometimes for days at a stretch, and equal comfort working remotely. * Bias toward delivery. Preference for shipping a working integration over perfecting a design that hasn’t met a real workload. * Self-direction. You will encounter environments and problems that are not yet documented and will need to work through them independently. ### Preferred Qualifications * Data provenance, lineage, and governance. Experience with lineage tracking, data catalogs, provenance systems, or governance frameworks. Depth here will be weighted heavily. * DoD or defense program experience. * Active Secret clearance (or higher). * Lakehouse & storage: Apache Iceberg (or Delta/Hudi), object storage (Ceph/S3-compatible), Postgres (including extensions like pgvector), columnar/OLAP engines (Trino, DuckDB, ClickHouse, Spark SQL). * Change Data Capture: Debezium or similar CDC patterns. * Governance, catalog & access: REST catalogs (Iceberg REST, Polaris/Gravitino/Nessie family), ABAC/RBAC patterns, OIDC/OAuth, lineage and audit. * Kubernetes awareness. Deep K8s expertise is not required; general familiarity with deployments, operators, and how applications run on Kubernetes is valuable. * Linux fundamentals, container runtime behavior, networking, TLS, secrets management. * IaC (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) and GitOps patterns (Flux, ArgoCD). * Familiarity with the CNCF ecosystem, including the distinction between foundation projects and single-vendor projects. * AI/ML awareness. General understanding of how data infrastructure supports model training, versioning, provenance, and AI operations. * Familiarity with Air Force or Space Force systems of record (e.g., MILPDS, ARMS) and how data flows between them. You do not need to meet every preferred qualification. You do need to be credible across the core data engineering requirements. Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience. Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States. Remote – USA $123,250—$166,750 USD ### Who We Are Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market. ### What We Do We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery. Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners. Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily. ### Who We Serve Defense Unicorns’ customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises. We proudly 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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