---
title: 'Senior Software Engineer at Defense Unicorns'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-defense-unicorns-remote-82frkkm6k6d5'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-31'
---

# Senior Software Engineer at Defense Unicorns

- **Company:** Defense Unicorns
- **Location:** Remote
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-31
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/defenseunicorns/jobs/5274682007

## Job description

Role Description:

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Senior to Staff 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, cloud native maintenance planning and execution tool.  You'll be joining Defense Unicorns’ US Navy team and be responsible for creating and owning end-to-end project delivery, working with stakeholders across multiple vendors, platform engineering teams, and government organizations.  You will work closely with the government project lead and be responsible for shaping the technical requirements of this effort, driving the project from development, user acceptance testing, production transition, and sustainment.

Responsibilities:

- Partner with software engineers, data architects, platform engineers, and a wide variety of stakeholders to translate ambiguous product requirements into technical solutions
- 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: 15-20%

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:

- 7+ years (senior) or 10+ years (staff) 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
- Experience with implementation of authorization and data governance, security telemetry pipelines, policy enforcement, and role-based access control to ensure compliance and data privacy across enterprise systems
- Excited to assess intricate problems, propose solutions, and implement them effectively
- Familiar with Core Kubernetes Concepts including but not limited to Controllers, Operators, and CRDs
- Passion for clean architecture, automation, and iterative modernization
- Familiar with Department of Defense acquisition or sustainment software modernization projects
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, comfortable conveying technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences as well as leading technical working sessions with partners and mission heroes
- Analytical, problem-solving mindset with a high attention to detail
- Experience working proactively, managing time efficiently, and thriving in a vibrant remote work environment!  ✨🦄

## 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)

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