Senior Software Engineer (Search)

Job description

GovDash helps businesses win and deliver government contracts that advance American interests. Our AI platform is a single, secure, workflow-driven system for the full contracting lifecycle, from opportunity discovery and capture through proposal execution, award, and post-award operations. In 2025 alone, GovDash customers won more than $5B in government contracts. We’ve raised $42M to move faster on product and scale GovDash nationwide. About the Role We're hiring a Software Engineer (Search) to help build GovDash's search, recommendation, and knowledge systems. This role is for engineers who enjoy working with data at scale, building intelligent retrieval pipelines, and creating systems that help users find exactly what they need across massive document sets. You'll work on search infrastructure, recommendation engines, and data pipelines that power discovery across the platform. While you'll work across the stack, this role leans backend and emphasizes search systems, data engineering, and retrieval-augmented AI. This role has a $190,000-$220,000 base salary range plus equity and is based in New York City. What You'll Do - Design, build, and scale backend services that power search, recommendations, and relevant data retrieval. - Build and optimize data pipelines that ingest, normalize, and index large volumes of government and enterprise data. - Create retrieval pipelines using embeddings to search and reason across thousands of documents. - Solve entity resolution challenges across messy, real-world datasets: de-duping, merging, cleaning, validating, and structuring data for downstream use. - Collaborate closely with product and engineering peers to deliver data-driven features. - Own projects end-to-end, from technical design and implementation through deployment and iteration. What We're Looking For - 3+ years of professional software engineering experience. - Strong backend development experience with TypeScript / Node.js. - Experience with search systems, data pipelines, or recommendation engines. - Comfort working with large, messy, real-world datasets. - Strong CS fundamentals, sound architectural judgment, and experience scaling production systems. - Self‑starter with an ownership mentality who thrives in a fast‑paced startup environment. - Clear communicator who collaborates effectively across disciplines. Nice to Have - Experience with embeddings, vector search, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). - Background in data science, information retrieval, or recommendation systems. - Experience with web scraping and data integration at scale. - Familiarity with government contracting data or public-sector data sources. - Experience building LLM-powered search or knowledge applications. Engineers at GovDash Today - Work with React (TypeScript), Node.js, Next.js, Temporal, and modern cloud infrastructure. - Move with speed and urgency without sacrificing quality. - Embrace hard problems and take pride in elegant solutions. - Put themselves in the shoes of users to build thoughtful, trustworthy experiences. - Value clear, frequent communication and strong team ownership. - Feel deep accountability and enjoy building for the businesses we serve. You Might Thrive Here If You - Enjoy building systems that help users discover insights in large datasets. - Care deeply about data quality, search relevance, and system reliability. - Are excited to build intelligent retrieval systems that power AI-driven workflows. - Care about America and her interests (non-negotiable).