Unusual Ventures

Platform Engineer - GovSignals

Unusual Ventures$180K — $250K *
Education, Government & Non-Profit
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years in backend, platform, or infrastructure engineering roles
  • Proven experience building platform or data infrastructure for engineers
  • Strong understanding of data modeling and Postgres internals
  • Hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production
  • Experience in scaling systems through migrations or throughput challenges
  • Security-focused mindset in sensitive environments using AI tools

Responsibilities

  • Build and scale infrastructure for 10,000+ government data sources
  • Deploy code across three security environments including commercial SaaS and self-hosted
  • Integrate compliance features into the platform for automated security remediation
  • Develop infrastructure supporting AI agents in managing government contracts
  • Collaborate with deployment teams to integrate sensitive customer data

Benefits

  • Meaningful equity in a well-funded startup
  • Medical, vision, and dental coverage
  • Unlimited PTO
  • Hybrid work at a historic Brooklyn Navy Yard office
Full Job Description
Platform Engineer

New York, NY • Full-time • Hybrid (3+ days/week in office)

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're hiring multiple platform engineers to form our founding platform team. You'll work directly with the CTO and own the data and deployment infrastructure the rest of the company ships on.

Platform engineers here also work with customers where it counts: our buyers ask hard questions about data, integrations, and security architecture, and engineers who answer them well help close seven-figure deals. The day-to-day is infrastructure, data, and backend.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

  • Build and scale the ingestion, storage, and search infrastructure behind 10,000+ government data sources: Postgres with logical replication, object storage on S3 and R2, pipelines that run continuously.
  • Ship one codebase to three security environments: commercial SaaS on Cloudflare Workers, self-hosted Kubernetes in AWS GovCloud for FedRAMP High, and IL5 deployments - including tooling we've built ourselves, like forks of Supabase and Trigger.dev for restricted networks.
  • Build compliance into the platform itself: automated CVE remediation that took 10,000+ CVEs across 20+ container images to zero in two weeks, secure-by-default services, auditable CI/CD.
  • Build infrastructure where AI agents are first-class users: agentic harnesses that support how billions in government contract volume gets won and managed, automated remediation loops, and deployment tooling used by engineers and agents alike.
  • Work with our deployment team to integrate customer data, including data underpinning America's warfighting capabilities, and support thousands of users at enterprises managing billions in contracts.

Our stack: TypeScript, SvelteKit, Cloudflare Workers, Kubernetes, Postgres, Trigger.dev, Chainguard, OpenTelemetry, AWS GovCloud

WHAT YOU BRING

  • 5+ years of experience in backend, platform, or infrastructure engineering roles
  • Experience building platform or data infrastructure that other engineers depend on.
  • Depth across layers: data modeling and Postgres internals, Kubernetes in production, backend services in TypeScript or Python.
  • You've taken a system through real scale - a migration, a cost cliff, a throughput wall.
  • You've built and broken infrastructure to understand how it works, and you bring a security-first mindset to sensitive environments.
  • You use AI tools heavily in your own work and know where they're reliable.

Nice to have: experience in FedRAMP, IL, HIPAA, or other regulated environments; open-source platform or infrastructure work.

$180,000 - $250,000 a year

  • Base Salary: $180,000 - $250,000
  • Equity: Meaningful stake in a well-funded, fast-growing startup
  • Benefits: medical, vision, and dental, unlimited PTO
  • Brooklyn Navy Yard office, 3+ days a week in person. The Yard built ships for the Navy from 1801 to 1966, now we build systems for Navy program offices.


THE TEAM

GovSignals was founded by four cofounders who lived with this problem from both sides - selling to the government and serving inside it - with backgrounds across the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Energy, Palantir, Amazon, federal contractors building for missiles, and state contractors building for prisons. You'll work directly with all four. The team at GovSignals has shipped to defense companies, scaled venture-backed startups, and founded companies of their own.

HOW WE HIRE
  • Intro conversation (30 min) - your background and how you use AI tools.
  • Technical interview (1 hr) - coding and systems design, without AI tools.
  • Co-founder conversations (15 min) - meet the cofounders.
  • Paid work trial (1 day) - real work with the team.


About Unusual Ventures

Unusual Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage startups. The firm was founded in 2018 by John Vrionis and Jyoti Bansal. Unusual Ventures focuses on investing in companies that are using technology to disrupt traditional industries. The firm has invested in companies such as Freenome, Figma, and Guild Education.
Learn more about Unusual Ventures
Size
10 employees
Industry
Founded
2018

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