Founding Software Engineer, Platform

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 95%.

Founded in 2023, GovWell powers 5,000+ mission-critical processes for agencies in 35+ states serving millions of residents. The company has raised $35M in funding from Insight Partners, 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.

• A mission that matters: Building AI-powered products to fix outdated government systems isn’t just a technical challenge—it’s a historic opportunity to improve our foundational relationship with government and ensure trillions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.

Downtime at GovWell means a permit office can't process applications, an inspector can't get their schedule for the day, or a resident can't pay a fee that's due today. Reliability here is tied directly to whether government services work for real people, in real time.

GovWell is hiring a Founding Software Engineer, Platform to build and operate the systems that make that reliability possible: deployment, observability, incident response, and security, all built for a company where downtime has real consequences, not just inconvenient ones. You'll write production backend code while owning the platform foundations underneath everything the rest of engineering ships.

This is a hands-on role with real long-term influence over how GovWell builds, deploys, and operates software as we scale — not a maintenance role on someone else's system, but the person establishing what "reliable" means as the company grows.

This role reports directly to our CTO and Co-Founder, Ben Cohen.

We have a hybrid work culture that combines regular in-person collaboration at our New York City office (3+ days per week) with flexibility to work remotely.

• 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 observability from the ground up — metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and on-call foundations that don't exist yet in mature form.

• 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 lets product engineers focus on shipping features instead of fighting infrastructure.

• 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.

• AWS

• Kubernetes

• Datadog

• GitHub Actions

• React

• TypeScript

• Node.js

• GraphQL

• PostgreSQL

• RedwoodJS

• OpenAI API

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.

Below: a picture of the entire GovWell team celebrating our Series A with a boat cruise on the Hudson!

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