FDE Data Engineer- Space (FedD141/FedD147)

Colorado Springs, CO or Florida Space Coast (Cape Canaveral / Cocoa Beach / Melbourne). Remote candidates will be considered, but local presence is strongly preferred.

Travel Expectations: Candidates based in Colorado Springs or the Florida Space Coast can expect on-site presence 1-2 days per week. Remote candidates should expect to travel to the engagement site for approximately one week every 4-6 weeks.

The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving needs of the organization. We are seeking a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise.

Data engineering breadth

• Unstructured data at scale. Experience storing and querying large unstructured datasets using data lake architectures. Spark experience preferred.
• Streaming & integration. Experience with stream processing infrastructure (Kafka, Redpanda, Flink, or equivalent) and bridging data from heterogeneous sources into modern pipelines.
• Data warehousing. Open-source data warehousing platform experience. These environments do not support proprietary platforms, so you need to be comfortable building without them.
• Pipelines & orchestration. Airflow, Dagster, Argo Workflows, or similar. Comfort building, scheduling, monitoring, and recovering production data pipelines.
• Data modeling & SQL. Fluent in SQL. Comfortable designing schemas for both analytical and operational workloads.

Open-source orientation. You are comfortable building on open-source tooling and contributing back to it.

What "forward-deployed" requires

• U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance. Clearance sponsorship available for the right candidate.
• Comfort working directly with mission heroes and government stakeholders. Clear communication with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Comfort with periodic on-site work, sometimes for days at a stretch, and equal comfort working remotely.
• Bias toward delivery. Preference for shipping a working integration over perfecting a design that hasn't met a real workload.
• Self-direction. You will encounter environments and problems that are not yet documented and will need to work through them independently.
• Data provenance, lineage, and governance. Experience with lineage tracking, data catalogs, provenance systems, or governance frameworks. Depth here will be weighted heavily.

DoD or defense program experience.

• Active Secret clearance (or higher).
• Lakehouse & storage: Apache Iceberg (or Delta/Hudi), object storage (Ceph/S3-compatible), Postgres (including extensions like pgvector), columnar/OLAP engines (Trino, DuckDB, ClickHouse, Spark SQL).
• Change Data Capture: Debezium or similar CDC patterns.
• Governance, catalog & access: REST catalogs (Iceberg REST, Polaris/Gravitino/Nessie family), ABAC/RBAC patterns, OIDC/OAuth, lineage and audit.
• Kubernetes awareness. Deep K8s expertise is not required; general familiarity with deployments, operators, and how applications run on Kubernetes is valuable.
• Linux fundamentals, container runtime behavior, networking, TLS, secrets management.
• IaC (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) and GitOps patterns (Flux, ArgoCD).
• Familiarity with the CNCF ecosystem, including the distinction between foundation projects and single-vendor projects.
• AI/ML awareness. General understanding of how data infrastructure supports model training, versioning, provenance, and AI operations.
• Familiarity with Air Force or Space Force systems of record (e.g., MILPDS, ARMS) and how data flows between them.

You do not need to meet every preferred qualification. You do need to be credible across the core data engineering requirements.

Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience. Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States.

Remote - USA

$123,250—$166,750 USD