Senior Software Engineer

About NationGraph

NationGraph is making public sector data accessible and actionable for businesses selling to cities, counties, state agencies, schools, and special districts. NationGraph’s data and intelligence engine provides buying signals derived from millions of public sector sources. Founded in 2024, NationGraph is dedicated to making uncommon knowledge common, because public data should actually be public. Learn more at nationgraph.com

You’ll Join A Team That:

• Has successfully built, scaled, and sold companies in the past.

• Built software infrastructure processing billions of dollars in transactions.

• Is backed by world-class VCs and operating partners who’ve invested in, and built, iconic companies.

About The Role:

• Own a product and engineering leadership role in our rapidly growing startup.

• We are looking for someone with strong opinions about building world class products. You will be critical in shaping features and architecture from the ground up.

• Build on the cutting edge with AI and building on top of the rapid growth in AI capabilities

• Accelerate your learning curve. Solve complex, uncharted problems with a high-caliber team.

• Every decision you make materially changes the trajectory of the company.

• Work with a team that deeply values product elegance and user experience in a design-driven culture.

• You will be regularly partnering with design, sales, and marketing on end-to-end product narratives.

What you’ll need

• 6+ years building production web applications

• Strong Python - async frameworks, ORMs, background task queues. You understand connection pooling, async execution models, and why a naive ORM query can tank an endpoint

• Strong TypeScript/React - Next.js, modern state management, component-driven UI. You build complex interfaces that stay fast as data and complexity grow

• Solid PostgreSQL - you're comfortable with indexing strategies, EXPLAIN ANALYZE, query optimization, and writing efficient queries against large tables. You've hit N+1 problems and know how to fix them

• Redis - caching patterns, pub/sub, basic queue usage

• REST API design - versioned endpoints, pagination over large datasets, bulk operations, authentication middleware

• Performance awareness - when something is slow, you can profile it, form a hypothesis, and fix it rather than guessing

• Docker & Kubernetes basics - containerized deployments, reading logs, understanding resource limits

• Independence - you can take a product requirement, break it into a plan, and ship it end-to-end

Nice to have

• Advanced PostgreSQL - partitioning, lock contention, connection pool tuning, safe migrations on live tables, denormalization tradeoffs

• Distributed job processing - retries with backoff, dead-letter handling, backpressure, graceful degradation when downstream services fail

• Frontend performance at depth - virtualization, memoization strategies, code splitting, profiling re-renders

• Redis beyond caching - streams, consumer groups, eviction policies, debugging slow consumers

• Kubernetes operations - horizontal scaling, debugging OOMKills, resource tuning, Helm charts

• Go - goroutine concurrency, channel patterns, memory efficient stream processing

• LLM/AI integration - calling model APIs at scale, rate limit management across providers, prompt optimization, RAG pipelines

• AWS services - managed Kubernetes, RDS, caching layers, VPC networking, IAM roles

• Terraform - reading and modifying infrastructure modules

• Real-time systems - websockets at scale, connection lifecycle, fan-out patterns, reconnection handling

• Data pipeline experience - processing large document sets (PDFs, spreadsheets), ETL workflows, idempotent processing, deduplication

• Payment integrations - subscriptions, webhook idempotency, billing edge cases

• OAuth / JWT / modern auth platforms

Our engineering stack:

• Frontend: React, Redux, Shadcn/UI, React Window, TypeScript

• Backend: Python, Go, PostgreSQL

• Infra: Redis (message broker), WebSockets, Docker, K8s

• Real-time: WebSocket events, background job polling

What You'll Get From Us:

• Founder-Level Exposure. Work closely with the CEO/CTO on all aspects of the business.

• A zero bureaucracy environment. We believe in moving extremely fast and making bold decisions without red tape.

• We believe in working with great people with a diversity of thought, an eagerness to learn, a boldness to challenge the status quo, and a deep care for the work we put out. If you align with us here, we strive to shape the working environment as such.

Benefits:

• Competitive salary + early-stage equity 💰

• Unlimited PTO ✈️

• High-quality health insurance, dental & vision coverage 🏥

• Company provided lunches (Mon - Thur) 🍜

Our Interview Process
We run a focused, high-signal process designed to be fast, thoughtful, and respectful of your time. Our goal is mutual clarity - not unnecessary hoops.
Round 1: Intro Conversation (30 min video call)
A short conversation to get to know each other.
We’ll talk about your background, motivations, and what you’re looking for. You’ll learn more about us, the role, and how we work.
Goal: Mutual fit and alignment on culture and values.
Round 2: Deep Dive (30-60min)
A working session where we explore your domain expertise and how you approach problems.
This is not trivia or gotcha questions - we’re interested in how you think.
Goal: Understand your depth, judgment, and problem-solving style.
Round 3: Case Exercise (Take-home or live)
A practical, real-world exercise that reflects the kind of work you’d do here.
You may complete it asynchronously or live with us depending on the role.
Goal: See what you can produce in your role.
Round 4: Final Round
You’ll spend with our founders, and dive deeper into how we’d work together.
Goal: Final mutual evaluation and, if there’s strong alignment, an offer.
Our Principles

• Speed: We aim to move from round to offer quickly, we appreciate your time.

• Respect: Every round has a clear purpose. No redundant interviews.

• Signal over ceremony: We care more about what you’ve built and how you think than where you went to school.

• Mutual evaluation: This is a two-way process. You’re interviewing us, too!

• Bar-raising: Every hire should make the team stronger. When in doubt, we pass.

We believe in-person work is our default.

We’re building a team of people who desires to work side-by-side and shape the culture of a growing company. In our experiences, some of the best ideas come from being in the room, feeling the pain, hearing the nuance, and catching the details that are easy to miss.

At the same time, we’re flexible and supportive when working-from-home is needed to maintain a healthy, balanced work environment.