Senior Software Engineer, Data Engineering

About NationGraph

NationGraph is making public sector data accessible and actionable for businesses selling to cities, counties, state agencies, schools, and special districts. NationGraph's data and intelligence engine provides buying signals derived from millions of public sector sources. Founded in 2024, NationGraph is dedicated to making uncommon knowledge common, because public data should actually be public. Learn more at nationgraph.com

You'll Join A Team That:

• Has successfully built, scaled, and sold companies in the past.

• Built software infrastructure processing billions of dollars in transactions.

• Is backed by world-class VCs and operating partners who've invested in, and built, iconic companies.

About The Role:

• Own the systems behind NationGraph's unique differentiated asset: the data acquisition platform that collects public information/records at scale, (purchase orders, contracts, various procurement documents) from 100k+ government entities across the country. No one else has solved this government data problem. You'll be one of the people who helps change that.

• This is real data engineering, not dashboard plumbing. You'll build high-volume interaction and ingestion pipelines with retries, dead-letter handling, checkpointing, and resumability; turn messy government documents (PDFs, spreadsheets, scans, portals) into clean structured data; and keep it flowing into the product reliably.

• Build with AI at the core: LLM-driven document extraction, classification, and form processing at scale are already in production here, but there's a wide-open opportunity to make them more modular, rigorous, cheaper, and faster.

• Also design some human-in-the-loop systems. Some pipelines pair automation with a dedicated operations team; you'll contribute to the internal platform they work in every day, complying with access controls, audit logging, and workflow tooling meeting SOC 2 requirements.

• Own problems end to end in a small, senior team. You'll take a goal like "automate records requests through web portals" from research to design doc to production, and you'll see your work show up directly in customer accounts and revenue.

• Every decision you make materially changes the trajectory of the company.

What you'll need:

• 5+ years building production backend systems

• Strong TypeScript/Node - the platform is a TypeScript monorepo (API + React frontend). You write well-structured, typed services and know your way around async execution, streams, and queues

• Pipeline engineering depth - idempotent processing, retries with backoff, dead-letter handling and recovery, checkpoint/resume for long-running jobs, backpressure, graceful degradation when downstream services fail

• Solid PostgreSQL - schema design, safe migrations on live tables, indexing strategies, query optimization, and comfort operating a database that other teams and the product depend on

• Document processing at scale - extracting reliable structured data from large volumes of inconsistent files (PDFs, spreadsheets, scans), with deduplication and edge-case handling

• LLM integration - calling model APIs at scale for extraction and classification, managing rate limits and cost across providers, structuring prompts and outputs so they're testable

• Third-party API fluency - webhooks, pagination, rate limits, and the patience to build robust clients around finicky or poorly documented APIs

• Operational ownership - you instrument what you ship, notice when a pipeline degrades before anyone flags it, and fix root causes rather than restarting jobs

• Independence - you can take a fuzzy operational problem, write the design doc, break it into tickets, and ship it end-to-end

Nice to have:

• Browser automation and scraping at scale - Playwright/Puppeteer, anti-fragile selectors, session management, structured crawling

• Email infrastructure - deliverability, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, threading and reply-matching, inbox provider APIs

• Building internal tools for operations teams - workflow software, queue-based work assignment, role-based access control, audit trails

• Python and/or Go

• Workflow orchestration - Airflow or similar

• S3/object-storage-centric data architectures

• OCR and document AI beyond LLM calls

• Compliance-aware engineering - SOC 2, least-privilege access, action traceability

• Experience with government, civic, or public-records data (Public records familiarity is a genuine plus)

Our data ops stack:

• Platform: TypeScript/Node monorepo, React frontend, Zod, strict ESLint

• Data: PostgreSQL, S3 object storage

• Tooling: Linear, Microservices, an AI-heavy development workflow

• Other: Python, Go, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS

What You'll Get From Us:

• Founder-Level Exposure. Work closely with the CEO/CTO on all aspects of the business.

• A zero bureaucracy environment. We believe in moving extremely fast and making bold decisions without red tape.

• We believe in working with great people with a diversity of thought, an eagerness to learn, a boldness to challenge the status quo, and a deep care for the work we put out. If you align with us here, we strive to shape the working environment as such.

Benefits:

• Competitive salary + early-stage equity

• Unlimited PTO ✈️

• High-quality health insurance, dental & vision coverage

• Company provided lunches

Our Interview Process:

We run a focused, high-signal process designed to be fast, thoughtful, and respectful of your time. Our goal is mutual clarity - not unnecessary hoops.

Round 1: Intro Conversation (30 min video call)

A short conversation to get to know each other.

We'll talk about your background, motivations, and what you're looking for. You'll learn more about us, the role, and how we work.

Goal: Mutual fit and alignment on culture and values.

Round 2: Deep Dive (30-60min)

A working session where we explore your domain expertise and how you approach problems.

This is not trivia or gotcha questions - we're interested in how you think.

Goal: Understand your depth, judgment, and problem-solving style.

Round 3: Case Exercise (Take-home or live)

A practical, real-world exercise that reflects the kind of work you'd do here.

You may complete it asynchronously or live with us depending on the role.

Goal: See what you can produce in your role.

Round 4: Final Round

You'll spend time with our founders, and dive deeper into how we'd work together.

Goal: Final mutual evaluation and, if there's strong alignment, an offer.

Our Principles

• Speed: We aim to move from round to offer quickly, we appreciate your time.

• Respect: Every round has a clear purpose. No redundant interviews.

• Signal over ceremony: We care more about what you've built and how you think than where you went to school.

• Mutual evaluation: This is a two-way process. You're interviewing us, too!

• Bar-raising: Every hire should make the team stronger. When in doubt, we pass.

We believe in-person work is our default

We're building a team of people who desire to work side-by-side and shape the culture of a growing company. In our experience, some of the best ideas come from being in the room, feeling the pain, hearing the nuance, and catching the details that are easy to miss.

At the same time, we're flexible and supportive when working-from-home is needed to maintain a healthy, balanced work environment.