Responsibilities
- Deploy and secure the UDS Data Capability within mission environments, including setting up the UDS Store with Iceberg, Rook/Ceph, pgvector, and Postgres, enabling air-gapped data transfer via UDS Transit, configuring governance policies using Pepr and Lula, and integrating streaming or legacy systems through UDS Connect with Strimzi and Kafka.
- Lead integration efforts with existing mission infrastructure by connecting to legacy databases, flat-file directories, SOAP and REST APIs, message buses, object storage solutions, and identity providers such as Keycloak and mission-specific SSO platforms, with emphasis on integration experience over development.
- Analyze and map intricate data ecosystems involving hundreds of interdependent systems, identifying data flow patterns, schema overlaps, and system dependencies to guide government stakeholders in architectural consolidation and optimization.
- Design and implement data pipelines that operate across classification boundaries, covering ingestion, transformation, cataloging, packaging models and datasets using Zarf, enabling cross-domain data transfer, and maintaining eventual consistency under DDIL network conditions.
- Implement data provenance, lineage tracking, and governance frameworks to document data origins, transformation history, and access controls across the data lifecycle.
- Operate and maintain deployed systems with initial responsibility for capacity planning, performance tuning, backup and restore operations using Velero, observability via Vector and Loki, incident response, and managing upgrade paths before transitioning to mission operations teams.
- Produce documentation and evidence required for system accreditation, including STIG compliance records, cATO packages, FIPS validation notes, and policy alignment artifacts for IL4 and IL5 environments.
- Serve as a field liaison by reporting operational challenges, filing product issues, writing incident postmortems, and proposing platform improvements based on real-world usage to influence engineering priorities.
- Enable mission team independence through comprehensive training, runbook creation, architectural documentation, hands-on workshops, and structured knowledge transfer sessions.
- Mentor junior forward-deployed data engineers by pairing on complex technical challenges, reviewing integration designs prior to customer delivery, and fostering technical growth across the team without managerial authority.
Work Arrangement
Hybrid — Colorado Springs, CO, Florida Space Coast (Cape Canaveral / Cocoa Beach / Melbourne)
Other
- U.S. citizenship is required.
- Must be able to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance.
- Clearance sponsorship is available for qualified candidates.
- Preferred locations are Colorado Springs, CO, and the Florida Space Coast (Cape Canaveral, Cocoa Beach, Melbourne).
- Remote applicants will be considered, but local presence is strongly preferred.
- Candidates in Colorado Springs or the Florida Space Coast should expect to be on-site 1-2 days per week.
- Remote candidates must be prepared to travel to the engagement site approximately once every 4-6 weeks for one week.
- Most work can be conducted remotely.
- Travel to operational sites may be required for initial setup, integration tasks, incident response, training, and knowledge transfer.
- The role is defined by the relationship with the mission team, not by physical location.
- Approximately 20% of time will be dedicated to mentoring junior Data Engineer FDEs, including collaborative problem-solving and developing technical judgment.
