Founding Software Engineer, Platform

Founding Software Engineer, Platform

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

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.