Software Engineer

EMPLOYER IS A CONTRACTOR FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. THIS POSITION REQUIRES U.S. CITIZENSHIP.

Role Description:

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Mid to Senior Software Engineer to help drive our transformation from legacy, on-premises software to a modern, cloud-native platform. In this role you will play a key part in designing and building our next-generation scalable data pipelines to ingest, transform, and load data from diverse sources. You'll be joining Defense Unicorns ’ US Navy team and be responsible for creating and owning end-to-end project delivery, and advocating best practices in database usage and system architecture. You will work closely with other software engineers, platform engineers, end users, and external stakeholders.
Responsibilities:

- Partner with data architects, analysts, and a wide variety of stakeholders to translate ambiguous product requirements into technical solutions

- Design, build, and maintain complex ETL/ELT workflows

- Implement security protocols, including authentication and authorization,

- Create optimized transformations to clean, enrich, and model data, utilizing cloud-native tools

- Ensure data quality, integrity, and compliance, maintaining metadata and lineage

- Help refactor and modernize existing on-prem systems into distributed, cloud-based services

- Contribute to the design of authentication, identity management, and RBAC/ABAC frameworks

- Participate in architectural discussions, code reviews, and ongoing technical improvements

- Drive best practices in microservice design, testing, observability, and CI/CD automation

- Collaborate closely with partner company engineers and stakeholders to devise the best solutions for our Mission Heroes

- Collaborate with the Defense Unicorns product team sharing improvements and growth opportunities for future projects

- Comfortable in an asynchronous, all remote environment

- Actively participate in communities of practice via Slack and Github Issues

- Integrate software products with existing defense systems, ensuring seamless interoperability and adherence to security protocols

- Own architecture decisions and ensure technical quality across the engineering team.

- Develop comprehensive documentation, including design specifications, user manuals, and maintenance guides

- Stay abreast of emerging technologies and industry trends to inform product enhancements and innovation

- Provide technical mentorship and elevate engineering standards across the team

- Communicate effectively with all levels of engineers and stakeholders internal and external to the company

- Influence product direction through deep understanding of user needs and system constraints

Travel Expectations/Requirements: 10-15%

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.
Preferred Experience and Qualifications:

- 3+ years (mid) or 5+ years (senior) experience with software engineering

- Experience building a software tool with core focuses on software lifecycle and management

- Expert level proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Go, TypeScript, Python) with the ability to write idiomatic, testable code

- Strong understanding of system design, API development, workflow orchestration (Argo Workflows preferred), relational databases, and cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure)

- Deep knowledge of database design, schema design, indexing, and query optimization

- Past experience leading a team through the decomposition of a complex monolithic application design into small, independent services that communicate with lightweight APIs

- Modern API design experience, beyond basic CRUD operations; use of RESTful services, and high confidence utilizing tools such as FastAPI in Python, ASP.NET in C#, or equivalent

- Exper