Founding Backend Engineer

🏛️ About GovWell

We the people (and the taxpayers) deserve efficient government — but the software powering government services is 20 years behind the private sector. GovWell builds software that helps government serve communities better. Founded in 2023, GovWell now powers critical services for municipalities and counties in 20 states serving 800,000+ residents. GovWell has raised $5.5 million from Work-Bench and Bienville Capital. Read about us in TechCrunch .

📜 Founding Story

Our mission is deeply personal for us. Ben Cohen , CTO and Co-Founder grew up helping his father — a general contractor — to apply for hundreds of construction permits. Ben’s experiences navigating clunky government websites inspired him to build better solutions for the millions of tradespeople whose livelihoods depend on getting permits fast. Prior to founding GovWell, Ben worked for Uber and Amazon as a Software Engineer, and earned his AB in Computer Science summa cum laude from Princeton.

Troy LeCaire , CEO and Co-Founder, was previously the first employee and Chief of Staff to the CEO at RippleMatch, a software startup, helping it grow from $0 to $10M in annual revenue and a $200M valuation over 5 years. Before RippleMatch, he worked for two U.S. senators from his home state of Wisconsin. Troy earned his BA in Government magna cum laude from Cornell.

☀️ Why GovWell?

• Impact at scale: Every feature you ship directly improves government services for hundreds of thousands of residents. From permitting small businesses to accelerating affordable housing developments, your work will make an immediate difference.

• A mission that matters: Fixing outdated government systems isn’t just a technical challenge—it’s a chance to improve lives. Your contributions will help governments work better for people who rely on them every day.

• A front-row seat to a startup in hyper-growth: As an early team member, you’ll learn what it takes to scale a company from the ground up. You’ll work closely with the founders, shape the culture, and leave your fingerprints on the product.

🧮 Technical challenges GovWell is solving

Click on the links for some sexy product demos :)

• Building a workflow management system that is powerful and easy to use, but flexible enough to accommodate the unique processes of 80,000+ government agencies in the United States (think: Salesforce for governments). Today, GovWell is used to process permit and license applications for everything from new affordable housing developments to small business licenses.

• Enabling a Figma-style document review experience that helps governments easily collaborate to review, mark up, and approve technical documents such as building and development plans.

• Developing a flexible and powerful document generation system to automatically generate official documents including permits and licenses for thousands of unique processes (think: Canva for documents).

• Creating a payments experience that makes it easy for citizens to pay billions in annual permit/license fees, property taxes, and utility bills online.

👥 Meet the Team

Meet Will Henderson-Frost , engineer #1 and owner of our backend service.

Meet Eric Gratta , engineer #2 and owner of our frontend repository.

Meet Nick Vollmar , engineer #3 and owner of everything DevOps and infrastructure.

Meet Amy Wang , engineer #4 and owner of data engineering and data migrations.

🖥️ Our Tech Stack

• RedwoodJS as our fullstack framework provides a modern, integrated development experience.

• React and TypeScript power our front-end, enabling seamless user interfaces and strong type safety.

• TypeScript and Node.js drive our back-end, delivering scalability and performance.

• GraphQL connects our front-end and back-end, facilitating efficient, flexible data communication.

• AWS to power our infrastructure

• PostgreSQL to run our database

🧠 Who you are

• 4+ years of backend development, with a focus on technical roles

• You have extensive experience implementing backend features. Some examples might include:

  • Implementing Business Logic: You have extensive experience in implementing intricate business logic in backend systems. For instance, you might have developed a complex algorithm to calculate personalized recommendations for users based on their browsing history and preferences.

  • Reducing Technical Debt: You've successfully tackled technical debt by refactoring code, optimizing database queries for performance gains, or implementing automated testing frameworks to improve code reliability.

  • Scalability and Performance Optimization: You've played a pivotal role in enhancing the scalability and performance of backend systems. This could involve horizontally scaling services to handle increased user load, optimizing database schema for faster query execution, or implementing caching mechanisms to reduce latency.

  • Security Enhancements: You've contributed to strengthening the security posture of backend systems by implementing robust authentication and authorization mechanisms, mitigating common vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or XSS attacks, and staying updated with industry best practices for secure coding.

  • Integration with Third-Party Services: You've integrated backend systems with various third-party services and APIs to enable seamless data exchange and functionality enhancement. This might include integrating payment gateways, social media APIs, or geolocation services into our applications.

• You have a strong product mindset: you love to ask questions and are obsessed with deeply understanding customer journeys using the product.

• You’d rather have a challenging adventure than “rest and vest”. You are excited about quickly responding to customer feedback with feature updates.

• You're motivated by having a positive impact in the world

• You align closely with our Core Values and have passion for our mission

💸 Salary and benefits

Compensation within the posted salary band will be commensurate with experience. All offers will include:

• Competitive salary + meaningful equity

• Up to 100% of premiums paid by GovWell for medical, dental, and vision insurance for yourself + partner

• Unlimited / flexible PTO

• 401(k) program

GovWell is an Equal Opportunity Employer, meaning that we do not discriminate based upon race, religion, national origin, gender identity, age, sexual orientation, or any other protected class.