Senior FDE Data Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Implement and enhance UDS Data Capability within the mission hero's environment — establish the UDS Store (Iceberg, Rook/Ceph, pgvector, Postgres), configure UDS Transit for secure air-gap data transfer, set up UDS Govern policies (Pepr/Lula), and incorporate UDS Connect (Strimzi/Kafka) where streaming or legacy connectors are necessary.

• Take ownership of the integration with existing systems — link UDS Data Capability to current operations: Big Bang, legacy Oracle and SQL Server, flat-file drops, SOAP/REST endpoints, message buses, existing object storage, and identity providers (Keycloak, mission-side SSO).

• Develop pipelines that facilitate data movement across classification boundaries — manage ingestion, transformation, catalog registration, model/dataset packaging via Zarf, cross-domain transit, and ensure eventual consistency under DDIL conditions.

• Manage what you implement — initial day-2 responsibilities: capacity, performance, backup/restore (Velero), observability (Vector/Loki), incident response, and upgrade pathways. Transition to the mission hero's operations team once stability is achieved.

• Create accreditation documentation — produce STIG evidence, cATO documentation, FIPS validation notes, and policy mappings. You will generate the necessary evidence for the mission hero's ISSM/ISSO to operate within IL4/IL5.

• Represent the mission hero's interests to product and engineering teams — document issues, draft postmortems, suggest operator enhancements, and advocate for the platform team regarding field issues. Your on-ground experience is invaluable.

• Provide training and knowledge transfer — empower the mission hero's team to be self-reliant: create runbooks, architecture documents, conduct working sessions, and facilitate knowledge sharing.

• Mentor junior Data Engineer FDEs — collaborate on challenging problems, review integration designs prior to delivery, and assist junior engineers in developing their judgment more rapidly. Your role is to enhance the team rather than manage them.

⛳️ Requirements

• Comprehensive experience in data engineering.

• Lakehouse & storage expertise — hands-on experience with Apache Iceberg (or Delta/Hudi), object storage (Ceph/S3-compatible), Postgres (including extensions like pgvector), and at least one columnar/OLAP engine (Trino, DuckDB, ClickHouse, Spark SQL).

• Proficiency in streaming & integration — familiar with Kafka (preferably Strimzi on Kubernetes), Flink or equivalent stream processing, CDC patterns (Debezium), and the capability to integrate legacy systems (Oracle, SQL Server, flat files, SOAP) into modern data pipelines.

• Skills in pipelines & orchestration — experience with Airflow, Dagster, Argo Workflows, or similar; comfortable with constructing, scheduling, monitoring, and recovering production data pipelines.

• Knowledge of governance, catalog & access — adept with REST catalogs (Iceberg REST, Polaris/Gravitino/Nessie family), ABAC/RBAC patterns, OIDC/OAuth, along with lineage and audit capabilities.

• Expertise in data modeling & SQL — fluent in SQL; capable of designing schemas for both analytical and operational workloads.

• Experience with Kubernetes in production — involvement in deployments, operators, CRDs, storage classes, and networking. While writing controllers from scratch isn't required, you should be able to read and debug them.

• Strong foundation in Linux, container runtime behavior, networking, TLS, and secrets management.

• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, Pulumi, or similar tools, along with GitOps practices (Flux, ArgoCD).

• Understanding of the CNCF ecosystem — knowledge of foundation projects versus single-vendor projects and their significance.

• Active DoD security clearance is necessary — TS/SCI preferred; at least an active Secret clearance with the capability to obtain TS/SCI.

• Ability to represent Defense Unicorns technically to a mission hero — actively listen before providing solutions, articulate clearly, brief both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and respond with “I don’t know yet, let me find out” without losing credibility.

• Willingness to work onsite when required — including in SCIFs and other restricted areas, sometimes for extended periods — while also being comfortable working remotely without compromising relationships.

• Strong inclination towards delivery — prioritize shipping a functional integration with minor imperfections over a flawless design that hasn’t been tested in a real workload.

• Self-motivated — the mission hero's environment will present challenges, and not all answers will be in existing documentation; you will need to create it.

• Maturity to mentor without being overbearing; junior engineers develop best through hands-on experience.

🏝️ Benefits

• Medical/Dental/Vision coverage.

• 100% Company Paid premiums.

• Health Savings Account available.

• Life Insurance provided.

• Disability Insurance included.

• 401k Retirement Plan offered.

• Opportunity for Company Stock Options.

• Budget allocated for Home Office setup.

• All full-time Unicorns enjoy Flexible Time Off (FTO) along with all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year's.

• Paid Parental Leave is available.

• Reimbursement for approved training and subscriptions.

• Coverage for conferences including travel, lodging, and fees.