Founding Software Engineer, Platform

🏛️ About GovWell

We the people — and the taxpayers — deserve good government. Yet today, interacting with government services is often frustrating and inefficient. GovWell is building the AI operating system transforming how governments serve communities, starting with local agencies.

GovWell replaces legacy software for municipalities and counties, empowering public servants to radically streamline public services and cut internal processing time for permits and licenses by up to 90%.

Founded in 2023, GovWell powers 5,000+ mission-critical processes for agencies in 30+ states serving millions of residents. The company has raised $10M in seed funding from Work-Bench and Bienville Capital, and the team works in person at GovWell 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• A mission that matters: Building AI-powered products to fix outdated government systems isn’t just a technical challenge—it’s a historic opportunity to improve our foundational relationship with government and ensure trillions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.

#LI-AC1