Founding Software Engineer, Platform

📋 Job Overview

GovWell is building the AI operating system transforming how governments serve communities, starting with local agencies. We replace 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%.

🏢 About GovWell

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.

🎯 The Role

GovWell is hiring a Founding Software Engineer, Platform to build and operate the systems that make reliability possible: deployment, observability, incident response, and security, all built for a company where downtime has real consequences. 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.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• 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.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 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.

🎁 Benefits

• Competitive base salary within the $200K – $300K range.
• Equity / stock options.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k) program.
• Flexible PTO.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Visa sponsorship information not specified.