Unusual Ventures

Staff/Senior Software Engineer, Document Intelligence & Data Infrastructure (Helios)

Unusual Ventures$150K — $180K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in software engineering, preferably with large-scale systems
  • Proficiency in building web crawlers and document-processing infrastructure
  • Strong background in fault-tolerant pipeline development and management
  • Experience with multilingual document handling and processing
  • Deep understanding of secure and scalable cloud environments
  • Demonstrated ability in real-time processing and system observability

Responsibilities

  • Expand the ingestion and document-processing infrastructure from source acquisition to publication
  • Construct and maintain web crawlers and connectors for diverse international data sources
  • Scale and enhance distributed processing systems for document conversion and enrichment
  • Establish common data contracts for heterogeneous and multilingual sources
  • Ensure pipeline reliability, security, and observability while managing corrections effectively
  • Develop real-time audio intelligence systems for multilingual transcription and analysis

Benefits

  • Full-time, in-person role in a vibrant SoHo office
  • Opportunity to work closely with the founding team and CTO
  • Direct impact on major decision-making processes in public sectors
  • Flexibility required for critical deployments and customer incidents
  • High degree of ownership and responsibility in a fast-paced startup environment
  • Engagement with complex, regulated, and high-stakes data systems
Full Job Description
Staff/Senior Software Engineer, Document Intelligence & Data Infrastructure

New York City | Full-time | On-site in SoHo, five days per week

Reports to the CTO and works directly with the founding team

MISSION

Build and operate the acquisition and processing infrastructure that turns global public-sector and open-source data into reliable, searchable intelligence. This role owns the path from source discovery and collection through normalization, extraction, enrichment, and publication. You will expand our platform to include new countries, languages, institutions, and source formats covering many additional areas of open source intelligence to advance Proxi's natural capabilities. We are looking for a senior engineer who has built and operated large-scale acquisition or document-processing systems in production.

Expected areas of expertise:

  • Web crawlers and connectors for continuously changing international sources.
  • Fault-tolerant pipelines with reliable scheduling, recovery, replay, and backfill capabilities.
  • Processing complex documents, structured files, images, audio, and video across languages.
  • Stable schemas, source lineage, correction propagation.
  • Operating secure, observable, scalable, and cost-efficient processing systems across cloud and restricted environments.
  • Document conversion, OCR, layout analysis, and structural extraction across complex file formats.
  • Multilingual audio, video, and document processing with reliable alignment and attribution.
  • Scalable inference infrastructure for batch and real-time processing across CPU and GPU workloads.
  • End-to-end provenance, versioning, correction propagation, and reproducible reprocessing.
  • Secure handling of untrusted content with rigorous quality evaluation, observability, and cost controls.


KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Expand Proxi's ingestion and document-processing platform from source acquisition through downstream publication.
  • Construct crawling and connector infrastructure required to discover, acquire, and continuously maintain international data sources.
  • Scale the distributed processing environment that supports document conversion, extraction, transcription, enrichment, replay, and backfills.
  • Establish common data contracts that normalize heterogeneous and multilingual sources without discarding their jurisdictional context or provenance.
  • Maintain pipeline reliability, security, observability, and cost efficiency while ensuring corrections propagate through every downstream system.
  • Build and operate real-time audio intelligence pipelines for low-latency multilingual transcription, speaker attribution, timestamp alignment, and confidence-calibrated tone analysis across live and recorded media.


NICE TO HAVE

  • Experience building international public-sector data pipelines across languages and jurisdictions.
  • Production experience with real-time transcription, speaker diarization, and tone or prosody analysis.
  • Experience operating large-scale web acquisition against complex and frequently changing sources.
  • Familiarity with legal, legislative, regulatory, archival, or similarly difficult corpora.
  • Experience deploying secure processing systems in GovCloud, air-gapped, or other restricted environments.


WORKING AT HELIOS

This is a full-time, in-person role based in our SoHo office in New York City. Team members are expected to work from the office five days per week when they are not deployed with customers.

Certain customer engagements may require background checks, security reviews, access approvals, or eligibility for a U.S. government security clearance. Some projects may be subject to U.S. citizenship or other customer-specific access requirements.

We're not looking for passengers; we want driven innovators with a hunger to build from the ground up - obsessed with pushing the boundaries of natural language understanding, document processing, and personalized relevance.

Helios is a fast-moving startup with ambitious goals. This is not a conventional 9-to-5 role. We expect flexibility during critical deployment periods, customer incidents, product launches, and other company-critical work. In return, this role offers unusual ownership, direct access to consequential institutions, and the opportunity to build systems that affect how major decisions are made.

HOW WE WORK
  • Own outcomes, not just assigned tasks. Identify what needs to happen and drive it through completion.
  • Move quickly without lowering the standard. Speed and rigor are complementary.
  • Stay close to the mission and the user. The best decisions begin with the real problem.
  • Work across boundaries. Everyone contributes beyond the narrow limits of a job title.
  • Communicate directly. We value clear thinking, honest feedback, and low-ego collaboration.
  • Build for the real world. Our systems must perform in complex, regulated, and high-stakes environments.

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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