Platform Engineer - GovSignals

Unusual Ventures; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, vision, and dental insurance

Unlimited PTO

Office at Brooklyn Navy Yard (3+ days,

Brooklyn Navy Yard office

Job summary

You'll work across ingestion, storage, and deployment layers, building scalable backend services and secure-by-default tooling for regulated environments, while engaging with customers to address data, integrations, and security questions.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in backend, platform, or infrastructure engineering roles.
• Experience building platform or data infrastructure that other engineers depend on.
• Depth across layers: data modeling and Postgres internals, Kubernetes in production, backend services in TypeScript or Python.
• You've taken a system through real scale — a migration, a cost cliff, a throughput wall.
• You've built and broken infrastructure to understand how it works, and you bring a security-first mindset to sensitive environments.
• You use AI tools heavily in your own work and know where they're reliable.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale the ingestion, storage, and search infrastructure behind 10,000+ government data sources: Postgres with logical replication, object storage on S3 and R2, pipelines that run continuously.
• Ship one codebase to three security environments: commercial SaaS on Cloudflare Workers, self-hosted Kubernetes in AWS GovCloud for FedRAMP High, and IL5 deployments — including tooling we've built ourselves, like forks of Supabase and Trigger.dev for restricted networks.
• Build compliance into the platform itself: automated CVE remediation that took 10,000+ CVEs across 20+ container images to zero in two weeks, secure-by-default services, auditable CI/CD.
• Build infrastructure where AI agents are first-class users: agentic harnesses that support how billions in government contract volume gets won and managed, automated remediation loops, and deployment tooling used by engineers and agents alike.
• Work with our deployment team to integrate customer data, including data underpinning America's warfighting capabilities, and support thousands of users at enterprises managing billions in contracts.

Skills

Backend engineering

Platform infrastructure

Kubernetes

Postgres internals

TypeScript

Python

AI tooling usage

Security mindset

Tools

Cloudflare Workers

Kubernetes (prod)

Supabase

Trigger.dev

OpenTelemetry

AWS GovCloud

Job description

Platform Engineer

New York, NY • Full-time • Hybrid (3+ days/week in office)

Due to the nature of our government work, this role is open only to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents (Green Card holders). GovSignals is an equal opportunity employer.

ABOUT GOVSIGNALS

GovSignals is the AI system of work for government contracting. It can take the government longer to buy a capability than an adversary takes to field one, and we exist to close that gap.

We're the only startup managing government contract data with AI in both FedRAMP High and DoW Impact Level 5 environments. Our platform monitors 5,000+ live government data sources, 100,000+ federal and state agencies, and 2,000,000+ government contracts in real time. Our customers range from small contractors to Fortune 500 primes with billions in annual awards, and our government work reaches mission critical contract management. In the past 18 months, we've earned FedRAMP High and IL5 authorizations, joined GSA MAS and the MDA SHIELD IDIQ, and signed some of the biggest names in government contracting.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're hiring multiple platform engineers to form our founding platform team. You'll work directly with the CTO and own the data and deployment infrastructure the rest of the company ships on.

Platform engineers here also work with customers where it counts: our buyers ask hard questions about data, integrations, and security architecture, and engineers who answer them well help close seven-figure deals. The day-to-day is infrastructure, data, and backend.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Build and scale the ingestion, storage, and search infrastructure behind 10,000+ government data sources: Postgres with logical replication, object storage on S3 and R2, pipelines that run continuously.
• Ship one codebase to three security environments: commercial SaaS on Cloudflare Workers, self-hosted Kubernetes in AWS GovCloud for FedRAMP High, and IL5 deployments — including tooling we've built ourselves, like forks of Supabase and Trigger.dev for restricted networks.
• Build compliance into the platform itself: automated CVE remediation that took 10,000+ CVEs across 20+ container images to zero in two weeks, secure-by-default services, auditable CI/CD.
• Build infrastructure where AI agents are first-class users: agentic harnesses that support how billions in government contract volume gets won and managed, automated remediation loops, and deployment tooling used by engineers and agents alike.
• Work with our deployment team to integrate customer data, including data underpinning America's warfighting capabilities, and support thousands of users at enterprises managing billions in contracts.

Our stack: TypeScript, SvelteKit, Cloudflare Workers, Kubernetes, Postgres, Trigger.dev, Chainguard, OpenTelemetry, AWS GovCloud.

WHAT YOU BRING

• 5+ years of experience in backend, platform, or infrastructure engineering roles
• Experience building platform or data infrastructure that other engineers depend on.
• Depth across layers: data modeling and Postgres internals, Kubernetes in production, backend services in TypeScript or Python.
• You've taken a system through real scale — a migration, a cost cliff, a throughput wall.
• You've built and broken infrastructure to understand how it works, and you bring a security-first mindset to sensitive environments.
• You use AI tools heavily in your own work and know where they're reliable.

Nice to have: experience in FedRAMP, IL, HIPAA, or other regulated environments; open-source platform or infrastructure work.

$180,000 - $250,000 a year

• Base Salary:$180,000 - $250,000
• Equity:Meaningful stake in a well-funded, fast-growing startup
• Benefits:medical, vision, and dental, unlimited PTO
• Brooklyn Navy Yard office: office, 3+ days a week in person. The Yard built ships for the Navy from 1801 to 1966, now we build systems for Navy program offices.

THE TEAM

GovSignals was founded by four cofounders who lived with this problem from both sides — selling to the government and serving inside it — with backgrounds across the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Energy, Palantir, Amazon, federal contractors building for missiles, and state contractors building for prisons. You'll work directly with all four. The team at GovSignals has shipped to defense companies, scaled venture-backed startups, and founded companies of their own.

HOW WE HIRE

• Intro conversation (30 min) — your background and how you use AI tools.
• Technical interview (1 hr) — coding and systems design, without AI tools.
• Co-founder conversations (15 min) — meet the cofounders.
• Paid work trial (1 day) — real work with the team.