Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) C-UAS

Job description

EMPLOYER IS A CONTRACTOR FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. THIS POSITION REQUIRES 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- and lead the software integration of modular Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems (C-UAS) sensors and effectors. You will deploy, harden, integrate, and operate our modular C-UAS solution. 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 genuinely calls for it — initial standup, in-SCIF integration work, on-the-ground incident response, training, and knowledge transfer- and you'll be on a video call or in a shared chat with that same mission hero the rest of the time. The job is being their engineer, not living at their desk. You are a cross-functional engineering leader. You can take responsibility for the full breadth of a data and software integration platform- make it work where it has to work, analyze what's running through it, and solve problems in real time for the mission hero. About 20% of your time, you'll also help make Defense Unicorns ' forward-deployed team better — pairing with junior Data Engineer FDEs on hard problems, helping them develop technical judgment, and raising the ceiling on what the team can take on. Responsibilities Deploy and harden UDS Data Capability in the mission hero's environment — stand up 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. Own integration with existing mission systems — connect UDS Data Capability to existing infrastructure, including sensor arrays, computer-vision-enabled UAS interceptors, and a broad range of C-UAS solutions. Build pipelines that move data through classification boundaries — ingestion, transformation, catalog registration, model/dataset packaging via Zarf, cross-domain transit, and eventual consistency across DDIL conditions. Operate what you deploy — own initial day-2 operations, including capacity, performance, backup/restore (Velero), observability (Vector/Loki), incident response, and upgrade paths. Transition…