Founding Software Engineer (Platform)

GovWell; New York (NY); On-site; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base salary

Equity / stock options

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) program

Flexible PTO

Job summary

A government services tech company in New York City is hiring a Founding Software Engineer to build and operate the core backend systems. This hands-on role includes writing production code, improving deployment processes, and managing security compliance. With a focus on reliability and observability, the engineer will significantly impact how software is built and operated. This is an exciting opportunity in a startup experiencing rapid growth and aims to enhance public service through innovative technology.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
• Strong understanding of reliability and operational failure modes.
• Experience in CI/CD, observability, and production operations.

Responsibilities

• Own governance of deployment and reliability platform.
• Build CI/CD foundations to enhance deployment speed.
• Establish observability systems and metrics.

Skills

Backend engineering

Infrastructure management

CI/CD practices

Distributed systems

Communication

Node/TypeScript coding

AI tools usage

Operational reliability

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Datadog

GitHub Actions

PostgreSQL

Job description

🏛️ About GovWell

We the people (and the taxpayers) deserve good government — but today, interacting with government services is often frustrating and inefficient. GovWell is building the AI-powered platform that transforms how governments serve communities, starting with local agencies.

Our first product helps municipal and county governments modernize complex services like permitting and licensing. GovWell combines a highly configurable SaaS system of record with generative AI that automates work for staff, guides residents through services, and is radically simple to deploy.

Founded in 2023, GovWell powers 3,000+ critical processes for agencies in 29 states serving millions of residents. We’ve raised $9.5M in seed funding from Work-Bench and Bienville Capital, and work in person at our HQ in New York City. Read more about our founding story in TechCrunch.

☀️ Why GovWell?

• A mission that matters: Building AI-powered products to fix outdated government systems isn’t just a technical challenge—it’s a historic opportunity to improve our foundational relationship with government and ensure trillions of tax dollars result in high quality services. WATCH: Mission & Vision with CEO & Co-Founder Troy LeCaire

• Real-world impact: GovWell’s product is the system of record for government services that affect millions of Americans. From streamlining permitting for small businesses to accelerating affordable housing development, your work will make an immediate difference.

• Join a startup in hyper-growth: We’ve found product-market fit and are scaling the business very quickly (4X ARR growth in the last year). As an early team member, you’ll learn what it takes to build a successful startup. You’ll work closely with the founders while enjoying exceptional autonomy and ownership over your work.

🌟 Role overview

GovWell is hiring a Founding Software Engineer, Platform to build and operate the core backend systems that enable our engineering teams to ship quickly and safely at scale. This role sits at the intersection of product-facing backend engineering and the platform foundations that keep GovWell reliable, secure, and fast-moving.

You will write production backend code while owning the systems that power deployment, observability, incident response, and security across the company. Your work will directly shape developer velocity, system reliability, and GovWell’s ability to support mission-critical government workflows as we grow.

This is a hands‑on role with significant ownership and long‑term impact on how GovWell builds, deploys, and operates software. The role reports to the CTO and operates in a hybrid model with regular in‑person collaboration in our New York City office (3+ days per week).

💻 What you’ll do

• Own GovWell’s deployment and reliability platform, ensuring systems are production‑safe, observable, and resilient as customer and engineering load grows.

• Build and evolve CI/CD foundations that improve deployment speed, safety, and repeatability across multiple teams shipping independently.

• Establish and maintain observability systems, including metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and on‑call foundations.

• Lead incident response practices, including playbooks, escalation paths, postmortems, and continuous reliability improvements.

• Own platform‑level security and compliance foundations, including SOC 2 readiness, vulnerability management, and access controls.

• Improve infrastructure efficiency and cost performance in partnership with engineering leadership.

• Build internal tooling that enables product engineers to focus on feature development rather than infrastructure overhead.

🧠 Who you are

• 5+ years of experience as a backend, infrastructure, or platform engineer operating production SaaS systems at scale.

• Strong systems engineer with deep understanding of reliability, distributed systems, and operational failure modes.

• Comfortable owning CI/CD, observability, incident response, and production operations end‑to‑end.

• Advanced user of modern AI tools (Cursor, Copilot, GPT‑based workflows).

• Strong coder (Node/TypeScript or similar); you build systems, not just configure tools.

• High‑ownership, startup‑oriented operator comfortable owning a broad platform surface area.

• Clear written and oral communicator who can document systems, write RFCs, and lead postmortems.

🖥️ Our tech stack

• AWS

• Kubernetes

• Datadog

• GitHub Actions

• React

• TypeScript

• Node.js

• GraphQL

• PostgreSQL

• RedwoodJS

• OpenAI API

👥 Meet the team

• Ben Cohen, Co-Founder and CTO.

  • Ex Uber, Amazon, UIPath.

  • BA summa cum laude CS, Princeton

• Richard Le, Full-stack Eng

  • Ex Microsoft

  • BA summa cum laude CS, UNC Chapel Hill

• Zach Stecker, Mobile Eng

  • Prev Senior Eng at TodayTix

  • CS, Princeton

• Michael Sosnick, Fullstack Eng

  • Ex Meta SWE, Product at UMG

  • CS & Econ, UPenn

• Ethan Fuld, Fullstack Eng

  • Ex Amazon, PwC

  • Info Science, Cornell

• Portia Wilson, Data Scientist

  • Prev CompStak, Vitech Systems

  • BA Math & Econ, Lafayette & MS Data Science, Stevens

• Noah Bell, Fullstack Eng

  • Ex Biodock (YC W21)

  • BA summa cum laude, UNC Chapel Hill

💸 Compensation and benefits

Compensation within the posted salary band will be commensurate with experience. All offers will include:

• Competitive base salary.

• Equity / stock options.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.

• 401(k) program.

• Flexible PTO.

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