Forward Deployed Software Engineer

🏛️ About GovWell

Founded in 2023, GovWell powers 5,000+ mission-critical processes for agencies in 35+ states serving millions of residents. The company has raised $35M in funding from Insight Partners, Work-Bench, and Bienville Capital, and the team works in person at GovWell HQ in New York City. Read more about our founding story in TechCrunch.

🌟 Role overview

GovWell is hiring Forward Deployed Software Engineers to sit inside our most complex enterprise deals — the ones where a county's 20-year-old permitting system, a workflow no vendor has handled before, or a migration off legacy systems is standing between a signed contract and a working deployment.

This role exists because our biggest municipalities don't fit a template. You'll go on-site, diagnose what's actually blocking the launch, build the targeted fix when one is needed, and then decide what part of that fix should become a permanent, reusable piece of the platform rather than a one-off. Get this right and you turn a complex deal into a referenceable customer. Get it wrong and you either miss the deal or bury the core product in bespoke debt.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership engineering role based in NYC (3+ days per week in office), with travel as needed for key customers.

💻 What you’ll do

• Unblock complex enterprise deployments by diagnosing and resolving technical and workflow blockers during high-stakes launches — including migrations off legacy systems
• Partner with Sales and Deployment on late-stage deals, providing technical feasibility judgment and credibility with senior municipal stakeholders.
• Travel to complex or high-value municipalities to understand constraints firsthand and accelerate execution.
• Build targeted code or configuration when necessary — but treat every bespoke fix as a candidate for productization, not a permanent one-off.
• Translate recurring enterprise requirements into scalable abstractions, and escalate the durable ones back to core teams to shape roadmap decisions.
• Know when to build, when to configure, and when to push back — your judgment directly protects the core platform from fragmenting under enterprise pressure.

🧠 Who you are

• 5+ years of experience as a full-stack or forward deployed engineer in a production SaaS environment.
• Strong product judgment with a track record of deciding when to build, abstract, configure, or push back.
• Experience working on customer-facing deployments, integrations, or migration-heavy environments.
• Effective communicator with executive-facing credibility — you can hold your own in a room with a municipal CIO or department head.
• Comfortable operating under ambiguity and owning high-impact, revenue-sensitive problems.
• Strong coding ability in TypeScript/Node or similar.
• Startup-oriented operator who moves quickly without over-engineering.
• You align closely with our Core Values.

💸 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.