Senior Data Engineer

AI Engineering  |  Forward Deployed Engineering

Role Description

Defense Unicorns is seeking a senior Data Engineer to embed with a government team and its technology partners building an emerging AI-powered engineering ecosystem.

This role will focus on making enterprise data usable, discoverable, governed, and accessible to AI models, agents, and mission applications. The engineer will work across data ingestion, transformation, storage, metadata, APIs, search, vector and graph technologies, and the interfaces between the data layer and AI workloads.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on data engineer who can operate across the full data lifecycle and understands that data availability and integration are often the primary blockers to delivering AI capabilities. They should be comfortable entering an evolving architecture, learning unfamiliar systems quickly, working directly with commercial technology partners, and solving difficult problems involving data quality, lineage, access, performance, and security.

This is not a traditional analytics or business intelligence role. The focus is on building the data foundations and repeatable patterns that allow AI and agentic capabilities to access trusted data and move from prototype to produc