Founding Software Engineer (Platform)

Join GovWell, a mission-driven startup focused on improving government operations. As a Founding Software Engineer, you will build and operate the core backend systems that enable our engineering teams to ship quickly and safely at scale. You will have significant ownership and long-term impact on how GovWell builds, deploys, and operates software. This is a hands-on role that reports to the CTO and operates in a hybrid model with regular in-person collaboration in our New York City office.

• 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 and maintain observability systems, including metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and on-call foundations.
• 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
• Advanced user of modern AI tools (Cursor, Copilot, GPT-based workflows)
• 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
• 5+ years of experience as a backend, infrastructure, or platform engineer operating production SaaS systems at scale
• Strong coder (Node/TypeScript or similar); you build systems, not just configure tools