Backend Engineer, Collection Platform

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

At Vannevar, we build mission software for the national security, defense, and intelligence communities. The Collection Platform team builds the systems that acquire mission-critical data from websites, APIs, feeds, and third-party platforms.

In this role, you’ll own web scrapers, third-party integrations, and data pipelines that produce complete, correct, and timely data despite unreliable upstream systems. You’ll partner with mission teams, product managers, and engineers to define requirements and make tradeoffs among data quality, reliability, scale, and cost.

What you’ll do

• Build and operate production web scrapers, third-party integrations, and data pipelines.

• Design for schema changes, rate limits, authentication requirements, and partial failures.

• Build reliable retry, backfill, deduplication, idempotency, and replay mechanisms.

• Define and monitor data completeness, correctness, freshness, duplication, and provenance.

• Develop APIs, databases, and shared services for collection workflows.

• Partner with mission teams, platform teams, and product managers to evaluate sources and support new data requirements.

• Influence architecture, technology selection, and engineering standards for collection systems.

What we’re looking for

• You have 4+ years of backend engineering experience, including production web scraping, data ingestion, ETL, or third-party integrations.

• You write production software in Python and are familiar with relational databases and API design.

• You know how to maintain data quality across large, changing datasets.

• You have designed systems that tolerate upstream failures and changing external interfaces.

• You can make thoughtful tradeoffs among reliability, scalability, performance, maintainability, and cost.