Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Defense Unicorns is seeking a Senior Engineer to join the founding team of a new product capability being built from the ground up. In this role, you will work as a core member of the UDS Data team, collaborating with product leadership and defense customers to translate operational data problems into software solutions.
Responsibilities
- Own the design, delivery, and production quality of platform capabilities end to end — from initial architecture through deployment and observability
- Build and maintain open source infrastructure packages for airgap and cloud-native environments
- Write comprehensive tests at every level — unit, integration, and end-to-end — and hold the rest of the team to the same standard
- Work directly with product and customers to translate mission problems into platform capabilities
- Develop technical documentation including design specifications, ADRs, and runbooks
- Contribute to relevant open source communities and represent Defense Unicorns as a technical peer
- Provide technical mentorship and elevate engineering standards across the team
- Operate effectively in an asynchronous, fully remote environment
Skills
- 5+ years of software engineering experience with a track record of shipping production systems
- Proficiency in Go and/or Rust; comfort with Python for tooling and scripting
- Strong understanding of Kubernetes — operators, CRDs, controllers, network policies, and workload identity
- Experience with distributed systems concepts — consistency models, replication, failure modes, and recovery
- Strong testing discipline — integration tests, end-to-end tests, and a clear opinion on what makes a test suite trustworthy
- Strong communication and documentation skills — comfortable writing ADRs, design docs, and runbooks
- U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain and maintain a security clearance
- Experience designing and building data infrastructure — databases, object storage, streaming systems, or data pipelines
- Experience packaging and deploying software in airgap or disconnected environments
- Familiarity with PostgreSQL (including extensions such as pgvector), S3-compatible object-storage, and streaming systems such as Kafka
- Experience building and maintaining REST APIs and defining API schemas (ConnectRPC with protocol buffers, OpenAPI)
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, GitOps practices, and DevSecOps workflows
- Excited to work in the open: contributions to open source projects are a strong plus ✨🦄
Benefits
- Medical/Dental/Vision
- Premiums are 100% Company Paid
- Health Savings Account
- Life Insurance
- Disability Insurance
- 401k Retirement Plan
- Company Stock Options
- Home Office Budget
- 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
- Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
- Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)
Company Overview
Defense Unicorns is a software startup that provides open-source software and AI capabilities for national security systems. It was founded in 2021, and is headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA, with a workforce of 51-200 employees. Its website is https://www.defenseunicorns.com.