Backend Engineer, Collection Platform

The company 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 the company, 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 be a hands-on technical leader for collection and ingestion systems. You’ll build web scrapers, third-party integrations, and data pipelines that produce complete, correct, and timely data despite unreliable upstream systems. You’ll partner across engineering, product, and mission teams to meet mission needs.

What you’ll do

• Shape the architecture and technical direction of collection and ingestion systems, looking 6–12 months ahead to identify needs and develop plans to address them.

• Build and operate production web scrapers, third-party integrations, and data pipelines, delivering major services and infrastructure with impact across the organization.

• Design for schema changes, rate limits, authentication requirements, and partial failures. Set collection schedules based on source change frequency, user needs, downstream capacity, and cost.

• 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; simplify systems and processes so teams can deliver more with less work.

• Make sustained improvements to the stability, performance, and scalability of mission-critical collection systems.

• Partner with mission, product, and platform teams to evaluate sources, prioritize what to collect or repair, and measure whether collected data meets user needs.

• Guide engineers through design and code reviews, technical mentorship, and clear communication of decisions and standards.

What we’re looking for

• You have 8+ years of backend engineering experience, including deep, hands-on experience building and operating production collection or ingestion systems—for example, web crawlers, third-party data integrations, ETL pipelines, or change data capture systems.

• You have led the design and delivery of large services, complex libraries, or major infrastructure, with impact beyond a single team.

• You have a record of improving the stability, performance, and scalability of business-critical systems and maintaining data quality across large, changing datasets.

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

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

• You communicate technical decisions clearly and work well across engineering, product, and mission teams.

• U.S. Person status is required, as this role requires access to U.S.-only data systems and the ability to obtain a security clearance.

Nice to Have

• Experience with distributed task processing, workflow orchestration, or large-scale data pipelines.

What we offer

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

• Health, dental, and vision insurance

• Remote friendly with WeWork access

• Unlimited PTO, shared downtime during the federal holiday calendar, and company-wide off time at the end of each year

• 401(k) match

• Lifestyle & wellbeing stipends

• Salary top-up during military reserve duty

• Fully paid parental leave

• Child and pet care reimbursement during travel

The company is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.

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 NOTICE

We are committed to protecting the privacy of all applicants. Official emails from the company will come from an @the companylabs.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.