Founding Software Engineer, GovWell
Platform
$190-260k
+ Equity
3-5 days a week in office
Modern software for local government
Be an early applicant
Modern software for local government
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
$190-260k
+ Equity
3-5 days a week in office
21-100 employees
Company mission
To build modern software products to help government serve communities better.
Role
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
What the job involves
- 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)
- 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
- Our tech stack:
- AWS
- Kubernetes
- Datadog
- GitHub Actions
- React
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- GraphQL
- PostgreSQL
- RedwoodJS
- OpenAI API
Our take
Govwell creates software for planning and zoning within local governments, simplifying processes and modernising citizen services. With the intention of improving transparency, it is helping all sizes of government serve its communities better.
What stands out about GovWell’s workflow and automation technology is the fact that its platform is customisable. Government sectors, councils and organisations operate their tech in varying ways, and so GovWell serves these varying needs by allowing flexibility of use within its platform. This is facilitated by no-code tools to improve adaptability.
Ultimately, the platform helps local governments complete tasks in a fraction of the time. It’s a breath of fresh air in the sector, which isn’t known for its innovations, and GovWell has been smart to target this niche. It has seen good funding to support team expansion, enhanced product development and accelerated growth.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Aug 2024
$4.5m
SEED
Apr 2023
$1m
SEED
Total funding: $5.5m
Company benefits
- Equity ownership
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with up to 100% of premiums covered for you and your partner
- 401(k) savings plan
- Unlimited time off
- Hybrid work environment
- A fully stocked kitchen, and drinks on hand
- Team events and gatherings sponsored by us
Company HQ
Rose Hill, New York, NY
Leadership
Ben Cohen
(CTO & Co-founder)Previously Founder of Cohen Realty & Construction. Was also a Software Engineer at UiPath, Amazon and Uber.
Troy LeCaire
(CEO & Co-founder)Previously Chief of Staff for the CEO of RippleMatch. Was a Campaign Intern for Senator Russ Feingold, Legislative Intern for Senator Tammy Baldwin and Legal Intern at Froelich Law Offices.
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