Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) C-UAS
Defense Unicorns · USA
About this role
**Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) (C-UAS)** **Overview** - Forward-deployed engineering role supporting U.S. Government missions. - Requires **U.S. citizenship**. - Work is **mostly remote**, with travel to mission sites as needed (initial standup, SCIF integration, incident response, training, and knowledge transfer). - You’ll work shoulder-to-shoulder with mission operators/program engineers and lead software integration of **modular Counter-UAS (C-UAS) sensors and effectors**. **What You’ll Do** - **Deploy and harden UDS Data Capability** in mission environments: - Stand up **UDS Store** (Iceberg, Rook/Ceph, pgvector, Postgres) - Configure **UDS Transit** for air-gap data movement - Configure **UDS Govern** policies (Pepr/Lula) - Integrate **UDS Connect** (Strimzi/Kafka) when streaming/legacy connectors are required - **Integrate with existing mission systems** (e.g., sensor arrays, computer-vision-enabled UAS interceptors, and other C-UAS solutions). - **Build data pipelines** across classification boundaries: - Ingestion, transformation, catalog registration - Model/dataset packaging via **Zarf** - Cross-domain transit and eventual consistency across DDIL conditions - **Operate what you deploy (day-2)**: - Capacity/performance, backup/restore (Velero) - Observability (Vector/Loki) - Incident response and upgrade paths - Transition ownership to the mission operations team once stable - **Generate accreditation artifacts** to support ISSM/ISSO requirements in **IL4/IL5** environments (e.g., STIG evidence, cATO documentation, FIPS validation notes, policy mappings). - **Represent the mission to product/engineering**: - Document issues, write postmortems, recommend operator improvements - Communicate field challenges to platform engineering - **Train and transfer knowledge**: - Runbooks, architecture documentation, working sessions, knowledge-transfer materials - **Mentor junior FDEs (~20% of time)**: - Pair on hard problems, review integration designs, build technical judgment (no direct people-management responsibilities) **Clearance & Travel** - **Clearance:** Active **TS/SCI required** - **Travel:** ~**10%–25%** - **On-site:** Ability to work in **SCIFs** and other restricted environments for days/weeks when required **Required Qualifications** - Experience in **tactical edge** and **interoperable mission environments**, including: - **TAK Server**, **ATAK/WinTAK**, tactical communications - Disconnected/air-gapped systems - Production experience with modern data platforms: - Lakehouse tech (Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, or Hudi) - Object storage (Ceph or S3-compatible) - PostgreSQL - Query engines (Trino, DuckDB, ClickHouse, Spark SQL) - Streaming/data integration experience: - Kafka (or equivalent), stream processing, **CDC** - Integrating legacy systems into modern pipelines - Hands-on production pipeline operations: - Airflow, Dagster, Argo Workflows, or comparable orchestration - Building/scheduling/monitoring/troubleshooting/recovery - Data governance & auditability: - Cataloging/access control, ABAC/RBAC, OIDC/OAuth, data lineage - Strong **SQL** and data modeling for analytical + operational workloads - Hands-on **Kubernetes** production experience (deployments, operators, CRDs, storage classes, networking, troubleshooting) - Strong Linux/container/networking fundamentals (TLS, secrets management) - Infrastructure as code (Terraform/Pulumi or similar) and **GitOps** prac
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