---
title: 'Senior Platform Engineer (FedD239) at Defense Unicorns'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-platform-engineer-fedd239-defense-unicorns-springfield-bg6k6t7380v2'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-07'
---

# Senior Platform Engineer (FedD239) at Defense Unicorns

- **Company:** Defense Unicorns
- **Location:** Springfield, VA
- **Compensation:** $149k–$201k
- **Posted:** 2026-09-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-07
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/defenseunicorns/jobs/5251905007

## Job description

Senior Platform Engineer

AI Engineering | Forward Deployed Engineering

## Role Description

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

This role will focus on designing, integrating, and operationalizing AI agents and agentic workflows within a secure enterprise environment. The engineer will work across large language models, agent frameworks, enterprise data, APIs, developer tooling, and platform services to turn AI capabilities into reliable, mission-relevant workflows.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on engineer who understands both the capabilities and limitations of modern AI systems and can rapidly translate emerging technologies into working solutions. They should be comfortable experimenting with new models and agent frameworks, integrating agents with enterprise systems and tools, evaluating performance and reliability, and working alongside platform engineers and commercial technology partners.

This is not a research-only role. The focus is on moving from AI concepts and prototypes to secure, useful, repeatable agentic capabilities that can operate in production environments.

## Responsibilities

- Design, build, and integrate AI agents and multi-agent workflows using modern LLM and agentic technologies.
- Develop agent capabilities that interact with enterprise applications, APIs, data sources, developer tools, and mission systems.
- Integrate models, agents, tools, and enterprise data into secure workflows that can be deployed in controlled and classified environments.
- Work with LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector databases, tool/function calling, structured outputs, MCP, and related technologies.
- Develop mechanisms for agents to securely discover, access, reason over, and act upon approved enterprise data and services.
- Prototype and rapidly evaluate emerging models, agent frameworks, and AI capabilities to determine where they can create measurable mission or engineering value.
- Develop evaluation and testing frameworks for agent accuracy, reliability, safety, latency, cost, and task completion.
- Implement guardrails and policy controls governing agent behavior, tool access, data access, and human approval points.
- Integrate agentic capabilities with CI/CD and DevSecOps workflows to support repeatable development, testing, deployment, and lifecycle management.
- Collaborate with platform engineers to operationalize AI workloads within Kubernetes/OpenShift environments.
- Work with commercial AI and technology partners to integrate their capabilities into the broader engineering ecosystem.
- Troubleshoot issues across models, agent frameworks, APIs, data sources, networking, identity, and infrastructure.
- Develop reusable patterns for agent deployment, configuration, observability, evaluation, and lifecycle management.
- Document architectures, integration patterns, agent specifications, evaluation results, and operational procedures.
- Identify recurring AI engineering challenges that can be standardized, automated, or productized into reusable capabilities.
- Stay current with rapidly evolving agentic AI technologies and assess their applicability to secure government environments.

## Minimum Experience and Qualifications

- Active Top Secret clearance.
- Hands-on experience building applications or systems using large language models and generative AI.
- Experience designing and implementing AI agents or agentic workflows.
- Strong programming experience in Python and/or another modern programming language.
- Experience integrating AI systems with APIs, enterprise applications, databases, and external tools.
- Experience with one or more agent frameworks or orchestration approaches.
- Working knowledge of RAG, embeddings, vector databases, tool/function calling, structured outputs, and prompt engineering.
- Experience developing software in a Git-based, automated CI/CD environment.
- Ability to rapidly prototype, test, troubleshoot, and iterate in ambiguous environments.
- Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including testing, version control, APIs, debugging, and system design.
- Ability to work effectively alongside platform engineers, government personnel, and multiple technology vendors.

## Preferred Experience and Qualifications

- Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and tool-based agent architectures.
- Experience with multi-agent systems and agent orchestration.
- Experience with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, NVIDIA, or comparable foundation model ecosystems.
- Experience with NVIDIA NIM, NeMo, or similar AI inference/model-serving technologies.
- Experience with Red Hat OpenShift AI or Kubernetes-based AI platforms.
- Experience with agent evaluation and observability frameworks.
- Experience implementing AI guardrails, policy enforcement, human-in-the-loop workflows, or AI safety controls.
- Experience with LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or comparable frameworks.
- Experience with RAG pipelines, vector databases, knowledge graphs, and enterprise search.
- Experience deploying AI systems in Secret or TS/SCI environments.
- Experience with disconnected or air-gapped AI environments.
- Experience integrating AI into developer/DevSecOps workflows.
- Familiarity with GitLab, Jira, Confluence, Xacta, or similar enterprise engineering and compliance tools.
- Experience working with GPUs, model serving, inference optimization, or AI infrastructure.
- Familiarity with UDS, Zarf, Pepr, Iron Bank, or similar secure software delivery technologies.
- Experience taking AI prototypes into repeatable, production-ready capabilities.
- Ability to evaluate new AI technologies quickly and make pragmatic build/buy/integrate decisions.

What Success Looks Like

- Agentic capabilities move from prototype to mission use quickly, with working agents integrated into real government workflows rather than remaining isolated demos.
- Agents reliably connect to approved enterprise data, tools, and services, with appropriate identity, permissions, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop controls.
- AI capabilities are measurable and trustworthy, with repeatable evaluation methods for accuracy, reliability, task completion, security, and operational performance.
- Reusable agent patterns emerge, reducing the engineering required to build and deploy the next agent or AI-enabled workflow.
- AI integrates cleanly with the broader platform architecture, working effectively across the data, DevSecOps, Kubernetes/OpenShift, model, and application layers rather than creating another technology silo.
- The engineer becomes a trusted AI technical advisor to the Mission Hero, proactively identifying where agentic technology can create mission value—and equally important, where AI is not the right solution.

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 $148,750—$201,250 USD

## Who We Are

Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market.

## What We Do

We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery. Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners. Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily.

Who We Serve

Defense Unicorns’ customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises. We proudly support defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products.

## What We Work On

- Kubernetes
- Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
- Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
- Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
- GitOps
- Containers
- CNCF projects and open source products and packages
- Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
- Building and improving security delivery
- Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications

## Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy

Health:

- Medical/Dental/Vision
- Premiums are 100% Company Paid
- Health Savings Account
- Life Insurance
- Disability Insurance

Financial:

- 401k Retirement Plan
- Company Stock Options
- Home Office Budget

Leave:

- We offer all full-time Unicorns Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s
- Paid Parental Leave

Learning:

- Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
- Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)

Don’t have all the preferred experience or qualifications? Studies show that underrepresented groups like women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs if they don't meet every requirement listed.

At Defense Unicorns, we're committed to diversity. If you're enthusiastic about the role but don't match every criteria, we encourage you to apply. You could be the perfect fit for this or another role! Defense Unicorns is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, union status and/or beliefs, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.

[CCPA DISCLOSURE](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DzT00w2uadYw9TfdorHuEsvPccZvn_g4/view?usp=drive_link)

## About Defense Unicorns

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Defense Unicorns delivers secure, scalable, and vendor-lock-free software deployment solutions for mission-critical, air-gapped, and classified environments, primarily for the U.S. Department of Defense and intelligence community.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: Colorado, United States
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Rob Slaughter (CEO), Jeff McCoy (CTO), Andrew Greene (Co-founder)

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Defense technology, software development, national security, cloud-native infrastructure
- Target customers: U.S. Department of Defense agencies, system integrators, and mission teams operating in air-gapped, classified, or highly secure environments
- Mission or purpose statement: "Advance freedom globally by transforming how the U.S. defense and intelligence community buys, builds, delivers, and sustains mission capabilities."

## Products & Services
- **[UDS (Unicorn Delivery Service)]**: An open-source, platform-agnostic software delivery platform that enables the packaging, deployment, and management of modern cloud-native applications into air-gapped, edge, and classified environments. It automates security compliance, vulnerability scanning, and continuous ATO (cATO) workflows.
- **[Zarf]**: An open-source, air-gap-native software delivery tool that was the company’s first product, designed to simplify deploying containerized applications in disconnected environments.
- **Professional Services & Mission Support**: Custom engineering, platform integration, and mission-specific deployment support for DoD agencies and system integrators.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: $1 Billion+ (achieved unicorn status in January 2026)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $171.5M across two rounds
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Bain Capital (led Series B of $136M in January 2026), Ansa Capital and Sapphire Ventures (co-led $35M Series A in February 2024)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount of 150+ employees (35.9% YoY growth), 35,000+ LinkedIn followers (42.4% yearly growth), 34 active job postings, and a growing list of DoD and intelligence community clients.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep domain expertise**: Founded by veterans of Kessel Run and Platform One, the team has firsthand experience building and deploying software within the DoD, giving them unique credibility and insight.
- **Open-source, vendor-lock-free philosophy**: Their products (UDS, Zarf) are open-source, ensuring no proprietary vendor lock-in, which is a critical requirement for national security systems.
- **Air-gap specialization**: Their core technology is purpose-built for the most challenging deployment environments (disconnected, classified, edge), a niche that few commercial software companies can serve.
- **Continuous ATO integration**: Security and compliance are built directly into the software delivery pipeline, dramatically reducing the time to get new capabilities into the hands of warfighters.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling the platform**: With the $136M Series B, the company is aggressively investing in product development, engineering, and go-to-market teams to expand UDS capabilities and customer reach.
- **Expanding mission delivery**: Hiring across multiple "Mission Manager" and "Account Executive" roles focused on specific military branches (Air Force, Army, Navy, Space, USSOCOM), indicating deep vertical integration into each service branch.
- **Open-source ecosystem growth**: Continuing to build and nurture the open-source community around UDS and Zarf to drive adoption and create partnership opportunities across the defense software ecosystem.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven culture**: The company operates with a single belief: "a value not lived is not a value at all." Core values include "We Take Extreme Ownership," "We Innovate to Impact," and "We Are MISSION Driven."
- **Remote-first environment**: Most roles are fully remote from anywhere in the United States, with support for home office setup. Onsite requirements are clearly noted when needed for mission support.
- **Comprehensive benefits**: 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees (shared cost for dependents), company equity options, 401k, life and disability insurance, and generous paid parental leave.
- **Generous time off**: Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s.
- **Career growth**: Financial support for training, conferences, and professional subscriptions.
- **SkillBridge program**: Authorized DoD SkillBridge provider, offering internships and apprenticeships for service members transitioning to civilian careers.
- **Engineering-driven**: "Engineer Driven" is a core identity, with a strong emphasis on solving hard technical problems for national security.

## Sources
1. [defenseunicorns.com - About Us](https://defenseunicorns.com/company/)
2. [defenseunicorns.com - The Airgap Software Company](https://defenseunicorns.com/)
3. [defenseunicorns.com - Careers](https://defenseunicorns.com/careers/)
4. [Greenhouse - Jobs at Defense Unicorns](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/defenseunicorns)
5. [LinkedIn - Defense Unicorns](https://www.linkedin.com/company/defense-unicorns)

## Other roles at Defense Unicorns

- [Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) C-UAS](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-fde-c-uas-defense-unicorns-remote-cakzeym5bthd)
- [Business Development Representative - USMC](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-representative-usmc-defense-unicorns-united-states-r8edtgzdan51) — United States
- [Compliance Lead - CMMC (NIST SP 800-171)](https://feeny.ai/job/compliance-lead-cmmc-nist-sp-800-171-defense-unicorns-remote-2ehs0m4cq2yp)
- [Business Development Representative - Autonomous Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-representative-autonomous-systems-defense-unicorns-united-v6kqyw8zq6kn) — United States
- [Senior Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-defense-unicorns-remote-82frkkm6k6d5)
- [Senior AI Software Engineer (RD271)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ai-software-engineer-rd271-defense-unicorns-united-states-2vqpgg89bt0f) — United States
- [Senior Software Engineer - Virtual Machines (RD222)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-virtual-machines-rd222-defense-unicorns-united-states-3778w0wjnykp) — United States
- [Senior Platform Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-platform-engineer-defense-unicorns-colorado-xba5q1cdp31y) — Colorado
- [Senior Solutions Architect](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-solutions-architect-defense-unicorns-united-states-trxavrqsjjsy) — United States
- [Business Development Representative - Commercial](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-representative-commercial-defense-unicorns-united-states-yxkavpmgfz2t) — United States