Role overview

You can hail a car in 90 seconds, bank from your phone, and chat with an AI at 2am. Then you spend a Tuesday afternoon waiting for your number to be called at the DMV.

Swap the DMV for a permit office, a licensing board, a planning department - the experience is the same, and it repeats in more than 21,000 municipalities across this country. Trust in government has fallen from 77% to under 20% over the last 60 years, and most people don't form that opinion from the news - they form it in the permit office, on hold, waiting on an inspection that takes 6 weeks to schedule.

We don't think that's abstract or unfixable. We think it's mostly a technology problem, and technology problems can be solved by great engineers.

GovWell is hiring Senior Software Engineers to help build the platform doing that work today, at real scale: 5,000+ permitting and licensing processes running live across 35+ states, with customers reporting processing time cuts of up to 90%. Building departments that used to spend 70% of their time on data entry are spending that time on the work that actually needs a human - reviewing complex plans, meeting with residents, advising developers.

You'll work across the stack, building the kind of deeply configurable system that lets one platform serve thousands of municipalities with different rules, without collapsing into unmaintainable one-off logic for each one.

This role reports directly to our CTO and Co-Founder, Ben Cohen.

We have a hybrid work culture that combines regular in-person collaboration at our New York City office (3+ days per week) with flexibility to work remotely.

What you'll do

• Build, test, and ship full-stack features across GovWell's platform - from intuitive resident-facing interfaces to scalable backend services that power government workflows.
• Build the configuration layer that lets one system flex correctly across thousands of different municipal setups, instead of hardcoding logic per customer.
• Take ownership of product areas end-to-end - reliable, maintainable, and performant in actual government environments.
• Use customer feedback and production data to decide what to fix next, working directly with the municipal staff and residents who depend on it.
• Contribute to technical design discussions and code review that shape how the whole engineering team builds, not just your own features.

Who you are

• 3-5+ years of full-stack development experience building applications for enterprises and/or consumers. Strong preference for candidates who have worked in high-growth startup environments.
• You're excited to work with the latest AI models, both in the product and in your own development workflow.
• You've owned a large product area end-to-end and can point to something specific you shipped and stayed accountable for.
• Strong product instincts: you ask questions until you actually understand the customer's problem, not just the ticket description.
• You want a role with real technical variance - one week you might be in GIS edge cases, the next in fee-schedule logic, and you find that more interesting than narrower, more repetitive work.
• You align closely with our Core Values.

Our tech stack

• React
• TypeScript
• Node.js
• GraphQL
• PostgreSQL
• RedwoodJS
• AWS
• OpenAI API

Compensation and benefits

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

• Competitive base salary.
• Equity / stock options.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k) program.
• Flexible PTO.

→ Click here to meet the engineering team

Below: a picture of the entire GovWell team celebrating our Series A with a boat cruise on the Hudson!

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