Senior Software Engineer

Job Description

Vannevar builds AI systems for the Department of War's most consequential missions. We have 125 deployments across every branch and combatant command spanning our core platform and five distinct products. An an example of how we work, when major combat operations started with Iran, we fielded a new product supporting 24/7 operations and 9,000+ users in three months.How we build is our advantage: we deploy forward with the people who own the mission. Our engineers, product team, and CTO deploy forward to the point of friction, including visiting units in Ukraine. We focus on embedding directly with operational units supporting great power competition with China, combat operations with Iran, and counter-narcotics missions.

About the role

Vannevar is seeking an experienced full-stack engineer to build geospatial applications and platform components used by warfighters and intelligence analysts. You’ll develop tools that help users explore, analyze, and visualize geospatial data to make faster, better-informed decisions. Working alongside designers, engineers, subject matter experts, and operational users, you’ll turn complex intelligence requirements into intuitive workflows that support national security missions.

In this role, you will work in a small cross-functional team focused on delivering Geospatial awareness and analysis capabilities to defense customers engaged in strategic competition with near-peer adversaries. You will work across the entire capability lifecycle, including data extraction, ingestion, and analysis, building UI libraries and full stack applications, and integrating with agentic AI analyses.

Note: this role is also open to staff+ candidates.

What you’ll do

• Build sophisticated geospatial applications. Develop intuitive, high-performance interfaces that help users explore, visualize, and analyze complex geospatial information.
• Own problems end to end. Work across frontend applications, backend services, data ingestion pipelines, and infrastructure to deliver complete capabilities to users.
• Solve challenging data problems. Design systems that ingest, process, query, and visualize large volumes of geospatial data efficiently and reliably.
• Build reusable platform capabilities. Develop flexible mapping components and services that can be leveraged across Vannevar's products, including in constrained environments.
• Integrate AI into operational workflows. Build experiences that combine geospatial data with AI-powered analysis to help users discover insights and make decisions faster.
• Work directly with users. Partner with mission experts and operational users to deeply understand their workflows, iterate on solutions, and see the impact of your work firsthand.

What we look for

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping and owning production software.
• Strong full-stack engineering skills, including experience building modern web applications and backend services. Our stack includes TypeScript, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, and AWS, but experience with every technology isn't required.
• Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to design, build, and operate reliable, performant systems.
• Strong product intuition and genuine curiosity about users and their problems. You care about building the right thing, not just implementing requirements.
• A high degree of ownership, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to independently drive technical work from problem definition through deployment.
• An active security clearance or the ability to obtain one, and an interest in visiting users in the field to understand their missions.

Nice to have

• Experience building interactive mapping or geospatial applications using technologies such as Mapbox, MapLibre, deck.gl, or PostGIS.
• Experience processing, analyzing, or visualizing large-scale geospatial datasets.
• Experience building AI-native products or integrating LLMs and agentic workflows into production applications.
• Experience building data ingestion pipelines, including extracting and transforming data from external sources.
• Experience with Python or geospatial data processing libraries.
• Experience working directly with customers or operational users to develop products.

The base salary range for this position is $160,000 - $240,000. We hire engineers at multiple levels based on their experience, technical capabilities, and scope of responsibility. This range reflects the base salaries we typically expect to offer for this role, with individual offers determined by the candidate's qualifications and level.Equity is offered in addition to base salary.

What we offer

We’re proud to offer competitive benefits that support our employees. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• Remote friendly with WeWork access
• Lifestyle & wellbeing stipends
• Salary top-up during military reserve duty
• Fully paid parental leave
• Child and pet care reimbursement during travel

We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply, even if you don't feel like you're a perfect fit. If you're passionate about contributing to our mission, we'd love to hear from you!

IMPORTANT NOTICEWe are committed to protecting the privacy of all applicants. Official emails from the company will come from an @vannevarlabs.com domain. Under no circumstances will a legitimate representative from our company contact you to request passwords, financial information, or other sensitive personal data. Please be vigilant of potential scams.