Founding Backend Engineer

🏛️ About GovWell

We the people (and the taxpayers) deserve effective government. But the software powering government services is 20 years behind the private sector. GovWell’s mission is to build modern software products to help government serve communities better. After launching in 2023, we now partner with government agencies in 14 states serving 500,000+ residents. GovWell has raised $5.5 million in venture funding from Work-Bench and Bienville Capital.

📜 Founding Story

Our mission is deeply personal for us. Ben Cohen, Co-founder and CTO grew up helping his father — a general contractor — to apply for hundreds of construction permits. Ben’s experiences navigating clunky, outdated government websites inspired him to build better solutions for the millions of tradespeople whose livelihoods depend on getting permits fast.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, Co-founder and CEO, was employee #1 and Chief of Staff at RippleMatch, a software startup, helping it grow from $0 to $10M in annual revenue and a $200M valuation. Before RippleMatch, he worked for two U.S. senators from his home state of Wisconsin. He believes passionately in the potential for technology to help government work more effectively for citizens everywhere. Troy earned his BA in Government magna cum laude from Cornell.

💻 What you’ll do

• Build a product that will be used at scale by cities, counties, and citizens across the United States. GovWell is the primary workspace and system of record for our users - government staff typically use it 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Additionally, thousands of citizens use GovWell to access government services. You’ll see the direct impact of your work and receive immediate feedback with each new feature.

• Make an impact in an underserved, but societally important industry. We deserve effective, transparent government, but the overwhelming majority of cities and counties lack the modern software necessary to deliver it. GovWell is changing that.

• Learn how to build a company from zero to one. As a founding member of the team, you’ll see the entire startup journey. If you want to start your own company someday, there’s no better way to learn.

🧮 Technical challenges GovWell is solving

• 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.

🖥️ 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.

🧠 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:

• 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 base salary

• Equity / stock options

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

• Unlimited / flexible PTO

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. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.