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 April 2023, we raised $1 million in seed funding and today more than 120,000 citizens in 5 states rely on GovWell products to access essential government services.
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 Ben’s experiences navigating clunky, outdated government websites inspired him to build better solutions for the millions of tradespeople whose livelihoods depend on getting permits fast.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 B2B SaaS company, helping it grow from 0 to $10M in annual revenue and a $200M valuation. Before RippleMatch, he worked for two 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 laudefrom 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 employee #7 and engineer #2, 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 experiencethat 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 systemto 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 is our fullstack framework
Our front-end is written in React and TypeScript
Our back-end is written in TypeScript with NodeJS
We use GraphQL to communicate between front-end and back-end
Who you are
5+ years of frontend development
You’ve built a frontend system from scratch, knowing the intimate details of how data flows to/from every section of the system. If most of your experience is in creating component libraries or writing simple display components in React, this role is likely not right for you - but check back in a year!
You are a frontend / fullstack engineer who loves building products that real people use every day
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 have a strong product sense and customer-focused mindset
You align closely with our Core Values and have passion for our mission
Nice to haves
Salary and benefits
Compensation within the posted salary band will be commensurate with experience. All offers will include:
Location
The founders are both located in New York City and work in person 3-4 days per week at our office in Manhattan (28th and Park, next to the 6 train). We strongly prefer NYC-based candidates, but are open to exceptional remote candidates.
