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Staff/Senior Software Engineer, Document Intelligence & Data Infrastructure (Helios)
Staff/Senior Software Engineer, Document Intelligence & Data Infrastructure
New York City | Full-time | On-site in SoHo, five days per week
Reports to the CTO and works directly with the founding team
ABOUT HELIOS
Helios is building a new kind of company to solve America’s hardest problems, starting with the government interaction layer.
Government shapes every consequential market, but the infrastructure connecting public institutions and private organizations remains fragmented, manual, and difficult to navigate. Helios is rebuilding that layer.
Our core platform, Proxi, gives organizations the intelligence they need to understand what government is doing, why it matters, and what to do next. From that foundation, we design and deploy secure, mission-specific systems for government agencies, enterprises, and institutions operating in complex and highly regulated environments.
We bring together frontier AI, deep public-sector expertise, and forward-deployed execution. Our team includes leaders and builders from the White House, U.S. Department of State, Datadog, and Microsoft. We are backed by leading institutional investors and trusted by organizations working on high-stakes problems across government and industry.
MISSION
Build and operate the acquisition and processing infrastructure that turns global public-sector and open-source data into reliable, searchable intelligence. This role owns the path from source discovery and collection through normalization, extraction, enrichment, and publication. You will expand our platform to include new countries, languages, institutions, and source formats covering many additional areas of open source intelligence to advance Proxi’s natural capabilities. We are looking for a senior engineer who has built and operated large-scale acquisition or document-processing systems in production.
Expected areas of expertise:
Web crawlers and connectors for continuously changing international sources.
Fault-tolerant pipelines with reliable scheduling, recovery, replay, and backfill capabilities.
Processing complex documents, structured files, images, audio, and video across languages.
Stable schemas, source lineage, correction propagation.
Operating secure, observable, scalable, and cost-efficient processing systems across cloud and restricted environments.
Document conversion, OCR, layout analysis, and structural extraction across complex file formats.
Multilingual audio, video, and document processing with reliable alignment and attribution.
Scalable inference infrastructure for batch and real-time processing across CPU and GPU workloads.
End-to-end provenance, versioning, correction propagation, and reproducible reprocessing.
Secure handling of untrusted content with rigorous quality evaluation, observability, and cost controls.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Expand Proxi’s ingestion and document-processing platform from source acquisition through downstream publication.
Construct crawling and connector infrastructure required to discover, acquire, and continuously maintain international data sources.
Scale the distributed processing environment that supports document conversion, extraction, transcription, enrichment, replay, and backfills.
Establish common data contracts that normalize heterogeneous and multilingual sources without discarding their jurisdictional context or provenance.
Maintain pipeline reliability, security, observability, and cost efficiency while ensuring corrections propagate through every downstream system.
Build and operate real-time audio intelligence pipelines for low-latency multilingual transcription, speaker attribution, timestamp alignment, and confidence-calibrated tone analysis across live and recorded media.
NICE TO HAVE
Experience building international public-sector data pipelines across languages and jurisdictions.
Production experience with real-time transcription, speaker diarization, and tone or prosody analysis.
Experience operating large-scale web acquisition against complex and frequently changing sources.
Familiarity with legal, legislative, regulatory, archival, or similarly difficult corpora.
Experience deploying secure processing systems in GovCloud, air-gapped, or other restricted environments.
WORKING AT HELIOS
This is a full-time, in-person role based in our SoHo office in New York City. Team members are expected to work from the office five days per week when they are not deployed with customers.
Certain customer engagements may require background checks, security reviews, access approvals, or eligibility for a U.S. government security clearance. Some projects may be subject to U.S. citizenship or other customer-specific access requirements.
We're not looking for passengers; we want driven innovators with a hunger to build from the ground up - obsessed with pushing the boundaries of natural language understanding, document processing, and personalized relevance.
Helios is a fast-moving startup with ambitious goals. This is not a conventional 9-to-5 role. We expect flexibility during critical deployment periods, customer incidents, product launches, and other company-critical work. In return, this role offers unusual ownership, direct access to consequential institutions, and the opportunity to build systems that affect how major decisions are made.
HOW WE WORK
Own outcomes, not just assigned tasks. Identify what needs to happen and drive it through completion.
Move quickly without lowering the standard. Speed and rigor are complementary.
Stay close to the mission and the user. The best decisions begin with the real problem.
Work across boundaries. Everyone contributes beyond the narrow limits of a job title.
Communicate directly. We value clear thinking, honest feedback, and low-ego collaboration.
Build for the real world. Our systems must perform in complex, regulated, and high-stakes environments.
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
Helios is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate candidates based on their abilities, experience, and potential to contribute to our mission. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law.
Skills Required
- Experience building and operating large-scale acquisition or document-processing systems in production
- Experience with web crawlers and connectors for continuously changing sources
- Experience building fault-tolerant pipelines with scheduling, recovery, replay, and backfill capabilities
- Experience processing complex documents, structured files, images, audio, and video across languages
- Experience with data schemas, source lineage, provenance, versioning, and correction propagation
- Experience operating secure, observable, scalable, and cost-efficient processing systems
- Experience with document conversion, OCR, layout analysis, and structural extraction
- Experience with scalable batch and real-time inference across CPU and GPU workloads
- Experience with international public-sector data pipelines across languages and jurisdictions
- Production experience with real-time transcription, speaker diarization, and tone or prosody analysis
- Experience operating large-scale web acquisition against complex and frequently changing sources
- Familiarity with legal, legislative, regulatory, archival, or similarly difficult corpora
- Experience deploying secure processing systems in GovCloud, air-gapped, or other restricted environments
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.
