Data Lead (Defense)

Department: 1. Defense

Location: Hawaii, US, Colorado, US

Employment Type: FullTime

About Air Space Intelligence

ASI's mission-critical technology powers decision-making across aviation, defense, energy, and other critical infrastructure domains. Backed by top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, and Renegade Partners, ASI delivers operational decision superiority—compressing days of analysis into seconds of action. ASI is leading the way and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

What You Will Do:

You will own the reality layer that powers ASI's defense products. You will operate, improve, and expand the data flows that move operational data from mission systems into usable, trusted datasets for decision-making. This role is equal parts data engineering, data forensics, and technical communication. You will dig into real-world data, determine what it actually means, and translate findings into clear, actionable pipelines ready to drive mission-critical decisions for end users.

What We Value:

• Strong fluency with modern data engineering tooling and patterns: streaming and batch pipelines, schema evolution, data contracts, and lineage.

• Demonstrated ability to debug data: profiling, anomaly detection, reconciling sources, and separating signal from noise while cross-validating.

• Strong technical communication skills: you can explain what the data is doing, what it means, what is broken, why it matters, and what engineering should change.

• Comfort with distributed messaging and processing (Kafka, Flink, Spark, or equivalents) and modern orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, Temporal, or similar).

• Strong grasp of API design and integration patterns (REST, gRPC, GraphQL) and experience working across a range of data formats and wire-level protocols (JSON, XML, Protobuf, and binary protocols like JREAP-C or CMF-B).

• Working knowledge of modern network protocols, firewalls, system level connections, cross-system authentication, and an enthusiasm to get data flowing.

• Familiarity with defense operational data and mission systems, with an appreciation for delayed reporting, inconsistent identifiers, changing semantics, and obscure edge cases.

• Comfort operating in classified network environments (e.g., SIPR, JWICS) and working within accreditation boundaries (IL5/IL6, ATO processes).

• Experience deploying data infrastructure on Kubernetes and across hybrid cloud and on-prem environments.

• A bias for action and distinct aptitude for problem solving in ambiguous environments.

• Active SECRET or TOP SECRET U.S. Security Clearance.

How We Hire:

We look at the interview process not as a screening or test, but rather as an opportunity to simulate what it would look like working together. We build the interview process around you.