Platform Engineer
New York, NY • Full-time • Hybrid (3+ days/week in office)
Due to the nature of our government work, this role is open only to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents (Green Card holders). GovSignals is an equal opportunity employer.
ABOUT GOVSIGNALS
GovSignals is the AI system of work for government contracting. It can take the government longer to buy a capability than an adversary takes to field one, and we exist to close that gap.
We're the only startup managing government contract data with AI in both FedRAMP High and DoW Impact Level 5 environments. Our platform monitors 5,000+ live government data sources, 100,000+ federal and state agencies, and 2,000,000+ government contracts in real time. Our customers range from small contractors to Fortune 500 primes with billions in annual awards, and our government work reaches mission critical contract management. In the past 18 months, we've earned FedRAMP High and IL5 authorizations, joined GSA MAS and the MDA SHIELD IDIQ, and signed some of the biggest names in government contracting.
ABOUT THE ROLE
We're hiring multiple platform engineers to form our founding platform team. You'll work directly with the CTO and own the data and deployment infrastructure the rest of the company ships on.
Platform engineers here also work with customers where it counts: our buyers ask hard questions about data, integrations, and security architecture, and engineers who answer them well help close seven-figure deals. The day-to-day is infrastructure, data, and backend.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Build and scale the ingestion, storage, and search infrastructure behind 10,000+ government data sources: Postgres with logical replication, object storage on S3 and R2, pipelines that run continuously.
Ship one codebase to three security environments: commercial SaaS on Cloudflare Workers, self-hosted Kubernetes in AWS GovCloud for FedRAMP High, and IL5 deployments — including tooling we've built ourselves, like forks of Supabase and Trigger.dev for restricted networks.
Build compliance into the platform itself: automated CVE remediation that took 10,000+ CVEs across 20+ container images to zero in two weeks, secure-by-default services, auditable CI/CD.
Build infrastructure where AI agents are first-class users: agentic harnesses that support how billions in government contract volume gets won and managed, automated remediation loops, and deployment tooling used by engineers and agents alike.
Work with our deployment team to integrate customer data, including data underpinning America's warfighting capabilities, and support thousands of users at enterprises managing billions in contracts.
Our stack: TypeScript, SvelteKit, Cloudflare Workers, Kubernetes, Postgres, Trigger.dev, Chainguard, OpenTelemetry, AWS GovCloud
WHAT YOU BRING
5+ years of experience in backend, platform, or infrastructure engineering roles
Experience building platform or data infrastructure that other engineers depend on.
Depth across layers: data modeling and Postgres internals, Kubernetes in production, backend services in TypeScript or Python.
You've taken a system through real scale — a migration, a cost cliff, a throughput wall.
You've built and broken infrastructure to understand how it works, and you bring a security-first mindset to sensitive environments.
You use AI tools heavily in your own work and know where they're reliable.
Nice to have: experience in FedRAMP, IL, HIPAA, or other regulated environments; open-source platform or infrastructure work.
Skills Required
- 5+ years experience in backend, platform, or infrastructure engineering
- Experience building platform or data infrastructure relied on by other engineers
- Proficiency with Postgres including data modeling and internals (logical replication)
- Production Kubernetes experience
- Backend development experience in TypeScript or Python
- Experience deploying to Cloudflare Workers, object storage (S3, R2), and AWS GovCloud
- Security-first mindset; experience with automated CVE remediation and compliance in secure environments
- Heavy use of AI tools in personal workflow and understanding of their reliability/limitations
- Must be a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident (Green Card holder)
- Experience with FedRAMP, IL5, HIPAA, or other regulated environments
- Open-source platform or infrastructure contributions
What We Do
Unusual Ventures is raising the bar for what founders should expect from their venture investors. We enable startups with the hands on support and expertise they need to be successful during their early stage journey. Unusual Ventures is an early-stage firm that invests in both enterprise and consumer startups.
