Vannevar builds AI systems for the Department of War's most consequential missions. We have 125 deployments across every branch and combatant command spanning our core platform and five distinct products. An an example of how we work, when major combat operations started with Iran, we fielded a new product supporting 24/7 operations and 9,000+ users in three months.
How we build is our advantage: we deploy forward with the people who own the mission. Our engineers, product team, and CTO deploy forward to the point of friction, including visiting units in Ukraine. We focus on embedding directly with operational units supporting great power competition with China, combat operations with Iran, and counter-narcotics missions.
At Vannevar, we build mission software for the national security, defense, and intelligence communities. The Collection Platform team builds the systems that acquire mission-critical data from websites, APIs, feeds, and third-party platforms.
In this role, you’ll be a hands-on technical leader for collection and ingestion systems. You’ll build web scrapers, third-party integrations, and data pipelines that produce complete, correct, and timely data despite unreliable upstream systems. You’ll partner across engineering, product, and mission teams to meet mission needs.
What you’ll do- Shape the architecture and technical direction of collection and ingestion systems, looking 6–12 months ahead to identify needs and develop plans to address them.
- Build and operate production web scrapers, third-party integrations, and data pipelines, delivering major services and infrastructure with impact across the organization.
- Design for schema changes, rate limits, authentication requirements, and partial failures. Set collection schedules based on source change frequency, user needs, downstream capacity, and cost.
- Build reliable retry, backfill, deduplication, idempotency, and replay mechanisms.
- Define and monitor data completeness, correctness, freshness, duplication, and provenance.
- Develop APIs, databases, and shared services for collection workflows; simplify systems and processes so teams can deliver more with less work.
- Make sustained improvements to the stability, performance, and scalability of mission-critical collection systems.
- Partner with mission, product, and platform teams to evaluate sources, prioritize what to collect or repair, and measure whether collected data meets user needs.
- Guide engineers through design and code reviews, technical mentorship, and clear communication of decisions and standards.
- You have 8+ years of backend engineering experience, including deep, hands-on experience building and operating production collection or ingestion systems—for example, web crawlers, third-party data integrations, ETL pipelines, or change data capture systems.
- You have led the design and delivery of large services, complex libraries, or major infrastructure, with impact beyond a single team.
- You have a record of improving the stability, performance, and scalability of business-critical systems and maintaining data quality across large, changing datasets.
- You have designed systems that tolerate upstream failures and changing external interfaces.
- You make thoughtful architectural tradeoffs among reliability, scalability, performance, maintainability, and cost.
- You communicate technical decisions clearly and work well across engineering, product, and mission teams.
- U.S. Person status is required, as this role requires access to U.S.-only data systems and the ability to obtain a security clearance.
- Experience with distributed task processing, workflow orchestration, or large-scale data pipelines.
- Health, dental, and vision insurance
- Remote friendly with WeWork access
- Unlimited PTO, shared downtime during the federal holiday calendar, and company-wide off time at the end of each year
- 401(k) match
- Lifestyle & wellbeing stipends
- Salary top-up during military reserve duty
- Fully paid parental leave
- Child and pet care reimbursement during travel
We are committed to protecting the privacy of all applicants. Official emails from the company will come from an @vannevarlabs.com domain. Under no circumstances will a legitimate representative from our company contact you to request passwords, financial information, or other sensitive personal data. Please be vigilant of potential scams.
Skills Required
- 7+ years as a Backend Engineer or similar role
- Experience scraping data or strong desire to learn
- Proficiency with distributed systems
- Proficiency with Python
- Proficiency with AWS
- Proficiency with multiple database technologies
- Excellent communication and teamwork skills
- U.S. Person status with ability to obtain security clearance
- Active security clearance
- Experience building ETL workflows with large-scale messy data
- Experience with Temporal
- Willingness/desire to travel to visit users
What the Team is Saying
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Vannevar Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Parental & Family Support — Family-related benefits are described as fully paid parental leave, family-planning support, and reimbursement for child and pet care during required work travel. Feedback suggests these provisions stand out as a notable strength.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time off is described as unlimited PTO with shared downtime around federal holidays and a company-wide year-end break. Feedback suggests employees in some roles have successfully used the policy, reinforcing its practical value.
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Healthcare Strength — Health coverage is presented as comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance, alongside positive indications on plan quality from some sources. Feedback suggests healthcare sits among the more appreciated elements of the package.
Vannevar Insights
What We Do
Vannevar combines Silicon Valley innovation with former special operators to build AI for real-world national security outcomes. Since our founding in 2019, Vannevar has deployed its technology across 125 missions, safeguarding our service members and improving our country's deterrence. We believe our military service members and intelligence officers deserve access to the best technology American innovation can offer, and we are mobilizing frontier technology for this mission. Our founders have 30 years of combined experience across AI labs, national security strategy, intelligence agencies and special operations. We're supported by a number of leading VCs, including Felicis, DFJ Growth, Point72, Costanoa, and General Catalyst. Vannevar is one of the most capital efficient defense tech companies, reaching early profitability and becoming a defense tech unicorn in 2024.
Why Work With Us
We pride ourselves on being a team of passionate, low-ego professionals who share a commitment to engineering excellence and a genuine concern for the people and AI agents we deliver. Vannevar is a company that truly cares about its people and one of our core principles is "put your wellbeing first".
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Vannevar Offices
Remote Workspace
Employees work remotely.
We are distributed across the map, but united by the mission. We go where the mission takes us and deliver where others can’t. Honolulu, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington D.C., New York. You decide what's next.
