Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) C-UAS

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.

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.

What you'll do:

• 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…
• 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 ownership to the mission hero's operations team once stable.
• Generate accreditation artifacts — STIG evidence, cATO documentation, FIPS validation notes, and policy mappings to support ISSM/ISSO requirements in IL4/IL5 environments.
• Represent the mission hero to product and engineering — document issues, write postmortems, recommend operator improvements, and communicate field challenges to the platform engineering team.

Full details and application on the official Defense Unicorns careers page.