Software Engineer, Vannevar
Backend, Collection Fingerprinting
Defense for the digital domain
Open for applications
Defense for the digital domain
101-200 employees
Open for applications
101-200 employees
Company mission
To build software for the nation's most pressing national security problems.
Role
Who you are
- This role requires deep experience with browser automation, anti-bot defenses, fingerprinting and signature mitigation, distributed scraping architectures, and infrastructure designed for sensitive or misattributed environments
- Care deeply about the mission: the data we collect is enabling massive, generational impact across many national security missions
- Have strong back-end experience and understanding of distributed systems. Prefer typescript/python expertise
- Understand how anti-abuse, bot detection, fraud, or traffic integrity systems analyze traffic and operate at scale
- Are data driven and and have eye for instrumentation and monitoring
- You can reason about how small deviations in protocol behavior, timing, or runtime characteristics propagate into anomaly scores
- Are technically diverse and can adapt your tool stack quickly
- Communicate crisply: can write a one-pager that aligns stakeholders, communicates, risks, and drives action
- You prefer structural resilience over reactive tactics
- Are comfortable making hard prioritization calls with incomplete information
- Deeply understand how network-level and browser-level signatures combine to form a holistic risk profile in modern detection systems
- Experience with web scraping, browser automation, and similar
- Experience with national security problems and workflows, data platform/product work
- Familiarity with agentic systems and what makes data “tool-call ready”
- Full stack capability. This team leans heavily into the backend, but does touch the front end from time to time (React)
- Grit and creativity to keep going when faced with a roadblock
- Success in working problems to conclusion and trying different approaches until one works
- Ability to work autonomously
- Demonstrated bias towards achieving an outcome even if it requires helping or doing the job of someone else on another team
- Active TS / SCI Clearance is a plus but not needed
What the job involves
- You will be an engineer on the team building systems to collect hard-to-access data
- This data forms the foundation of our company’s advantage
- Your role is to elevate and extend our existing collection capabilities — strengthening the core engines, improving resilience in adversarial environments, and expanding how this data is exposed through interfaces for agents and other engineering teams
- We operate in environments where automated defensive systems are sophisticated and continuously evolving
- This role is about designing statistically disciplined, cross-layer systems that remain reliable under that scrutiny without sacrificing scale, stability, or operational integrity
- You will help shape the evolution of our collection stack end-to-end — from low-level evasion techniques and managed attribution browsing to clean, well-defined tool calls that agents can use predictably and at scale
- You’ll collaborate closely across engineering and mission teams, translating real-world data needs into durable technical systems
- Master our data and capabilities. We’ve built world-class data collection for some key national security data sets. Understand how we’ve built it, what our differentiators are, and how to take it to the next level
- Understand our users. You’ll need to understand their missions, challenges, and expectations to build systems that help them
- Shape our collection approach. You understand how our systems interact with defensive systems, and will develop and implement technical plans that keep high-value data flowing
- Build and maintain stable, scalable systems. Our customers operate 24x7 and need access to fresh, rich, operationally-relevant data. You will design collection systems that remain stable under sophisticated automated detection regimes
- Contribute to agentic capability. Ensure the tools you build and collected data is usable by agents (tool-call readiness, retrieval patterns, schemas/metadata, evaluation loops, etc.). Identify gaps where the right data isn’t getting into agent tool calls and coordinate fixes
Our take
As intelligence analysts work to solve rapidly evolving and increasingly challenging national security problems, modern technology is vital in achieving optimal results as there is no room for failure. Vannevar's innovative foreign text platform delivers solutions to some of today’s most important national security problems.
The company’s workflow platform, Decrypt, uses machine learning and automation to understand, target and respond to foreign actors in ways not previously possible. The platform is a proven success, driving Vannevar’s growth and attracting a $40M OTA contract with the Department of Defense.
Yielding impressive traction so far, the company is using its latest funding round to accelerate strategic initiatives and expand the scope of its technology. This comes after a period of rapid growth and sustained profitability, all suggesting a fruitful future for the company long-term.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
119% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jan 2023
$75m
SERIES B
Aug 2021
$12m
SERIES A
Total funding: $91.5m
Company benefits
- Health/Dental/Vision Insurance
- Equity + 401(k) Match
- Open PTO + all Federal Holidays and Dec 23-31
- Paid Parental Leave
- 100% Remote - Work From Anywhere in the US
- Flexible Work Environment - You Manage Your Work Day
- Quarterly Off-Site Travel for Team-Building
Company HQ
Palo Alto, CA
Leadership
Nini Hamrick
(President & Co-founder)Former US Intelligence Officer working as a Political & Counterterrorism Programs Analyst. Previous Chief of Staff to the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and was a Counterterrorism Analyst for the United States Department of Defense.
Brett Granberg
(CEO)Current Advisor at Lilt. Former Investor at In-Q-Tel and previously worked as a Business Analyst at McKinsey & Company.
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