Staff/Senior Software Engineer, Document Intelligence & Data Infrastructure

Helios; New York (NY); On-site; USD 185,000 - 235,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Ownership in projects

Direct access to institutions

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Helios is hiring a senior engineer in New York City to expand Proxi’s data ingestion and document-processing stack. The role focuses on building robust, multilingual, scalable pipelines with strong provenance and secure cloud practices.

You will work closely with the CTO and founding team on open‑source data sources, multilingual media, and end‑to‑end processing—from discovery to publication. This is a high-impact, in-person, five‑day‑per‑week role.

Qualifications

• Senior software engineer with experience building large-scale ingestion and document-processing systems.
• Experience processing multilingual data and diverse source formats.
• Background in secure, observable, cost-efficient cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Expand Proxi’s ingestion and document-processing platform from source acquisition through publication.
• Build crawling and connector infrastructure to discover and maintain international data sources.
• Scale distributed processing for document conversion, extraction, transcription, enrichment, replay, and backfills.
• Define common data contracts to normalize multilingual sources while preserving provenance.
• Maintain pipeline reliability, security, observability, and cost efficiency across systems.
• Develop real-time audio intelligence pipelines for multilingual transcription and tone analysis.

Skills

Web crawlers

Fault-tolerant pipelines

Multilingual processing

Data provenance

Secure cloud architecture

OCR & layout analysis

Real-time processing

GPU/CPU inference

Education

BS in CS or related field

Tools

Cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)

Job description

New York City | Full-time | On-site in SoHo, five days per week

Reports to the CTO and works directly with the founding team

About Helios Helios is building a new kind of company to solve America’s hardest problems, starting with the government interaction layer.

Government shapes every consequential market, but the infrastructure connecting public institutions and private organizations remains fragmented, manual, and difficult to navigate. Helios is rebuilding that layer.

Our core platform, Proxi, gives organizations the intelligence they need to understand what government is doing, why it matters, and what to do next. From that foundation, we design and deploy secure, mission‑specific systems for government agencies, enterprises, and institutions operating in complex and highly regulated environments.

We bring together frontier AI, deep public‑sector expertise, and forward‑deployed execution. Our team includes leaders and builders from the White House, U.S. Department of State, Datadog, and Microsoft. We are backed by leading institutional investors and trusted by organizations working on high‑stakes problems across government and industry.

MISSION

Build and operate the acquisition and processing infrastructure that turns global public‑sector and open‑source data into reliable, searchable intelligence. This role owns the path from source discovery and collection through normalization, extraction, enrichment, and publication. You will expand our platform to include new countries, languages, institutions, and source formats covering many additional areas of open source intelligence to advance Proxi’s natural capabilities. We are looking for a senior engineer who has built and operated large‑scale acquisition or document‑processing systems in production. Expected areas of expertise:

• Web crawlers and connectors for continuously changing international sources.
• Fault‑tolerant pipelines with reliable scheduling, recovery, replay, and backfill capabilities.
• Processing complex documents, structured files, images, audio, and video across languages.
• Stable schemas, source lineage, correction propagation.
• Operating secure, observable, scalable, and cost‑efficient processing systems across cloud and restricted environments.
• Document conversion, OCR, layout analysis, and structural extraction across complex file formats.
• Multilingual audio, video, and document processing with reliable alignment and attribution.
• Scalable inference infrastructure for batch and real‑time processing across CPU and GPU workloads.
• End‑to‑end provenance, versioning, correction propagation, and reproducible reprocessing.
• Secure handling of untrusted content with rigorous quality evaluation, observability, and cost controls.

Key Responsibilities

• Expand Proxi’s ingestion and document‑processing platform from source acquisition through downstream publication.
• Construct crawling and connector infrastructure required to discover, acquire, and continuously maintain international data sources.
• Scale the distributed processing environment that supports document conversion, extraction, transcription, enrichment, replay, and backfills.
• Establish common data contracts that normalize heterogeneous and multilingual sources without discarding their jurisdictional context or provenance.
• Maintain pipeline reliability, security, observability, and cost efficiency while ensuring corrections propagate through every downstream system.
• Build and operate real‑time audio intelligence pipelines for low‑latency multilingual transcription, speaker attribution, timestamp alignment, and confidence‑calibrated tone analysis across live and recorded media.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience building international public‑sector data pipelines across languages and jurisdictions.
• Production experience with real‑time transcription, speaker diarization, and tone or prosody analysis.
• Experience operating large‑scale web acquisition against complex and frequently changing sources.
• Familiarity with legal, legislative, regulatory, archival, or similarly difficult corpora.
• Experience deploying secure processing systems in GovCloud, air‑gapped, or other restricted environments.

WORKING AT HELIOS

This is a full‑time, in‑person role based in our SoHo office in New York City. Team members are expected to work from the office five days per week when they are not deployed with customers.

Certain customer engagements may require background checks, security reviews, access approvals, or eligibility for a U.S. government security clearance. Some projects may be subject to U.S. citizenship or other customer‑specific access requirements.

We’re not looking for passengers; we want driven innovators with a hunger to build from the ground up – obsessed with pushing the boundaries of natural language understanding, document processing, and personalized relevance.

Helios is a fast‑moving startup with ambitious goals. This is not a conventional 9‑to‑5 role. We expect flexibility during critical deployment periods, customer incidents, product launches, and other company‑critical work. In return, this role offers unusual ownership, direct access to consequential institutions, and the opportunity to build systems that affect how major decisions are made.

How We Work

• Own outcomes, not just assigned tasks. Identify what needs to happen and drive it through completion.
• Move quickly without lowering the standard. Speed and rigor are complementary.
• Stay close to the mission and the user. The best decisions begin with the real problem.
• Work across boundaries. Everyone contributes beyond the narrow limits of a job title.
• Communicate directly. We value clear thinking, honest feedback, and low‑ego collaboration.
• Build for the real world. Our systems must perform in complex, regulated, and high‑stakes environments.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Helios is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate candidates based on their abilities, experience, and potential to contribute to our mission. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law.

Compensation Range: $185K – $235K