Software Engineer Backend (Collection)

You will be an engineer on the team building systems to collect hard-to-access data. This data forms the foundation of our company’s advantage. Your role is to elevate and extend our existing collection capabilities — strengthening the core engines improving resilience in adversarial environments and expanding how this data is exposed through interfaces for agents and other engineering teams. We operate in environments where automated defensive systems are sophisticated and continuously evolving. This role is about designing statistically disciplined cross-layer systems that remain reliable under that scrutiny without sacrificing scale stability or operational integrity.

This role requires deep experience with browser automation anti-bot defenses fingerprinting and signature mitigation distributed scraping architectures and infrastructure designed for sensitive or misattributed environments. You will help shape the evolution of our collection stack end-to-end — from low-level evasion techniques and managed attribution browsing to clean well-defined tool calls that agents can use predictably and at scale. You’ll collaborate closely across engineering and mission teams translating real-world data needs into durable technical systems.

• Master our data and capabilities. We’ve built world-class data collection for some key national security data sets. Understand how we’ve built it what our differentiators are and how to take it to the next level.
• Understand our users. You’ll need to understand their missions challenges and expectations to build systems that help them.
• Shape our collection approach. You understand how our systems interact with defensive systems and will develop and implement technical plans that keep high-value data flowing.
• Build and maintain stable scalable systems. Our customers operate 24x7 and need access to fresh rich operationally-relevant data. You will design collection systems that remain stable under sophisticated automated detection regimes.
• Contribute to agentic capability. Ensure the tools you build and collected data is usable by agents (tool-call readiness retrieval patterns schemas/metadata evaluation loops etc.). Identify gaps where the right data isn’t getting into agent tool calls and coordinate fixes.

• Care deeply about the mission: the data we collect is enabling massive generational impact across many national security missions.
• Have strong back-end experience and understanding of distributed systems. Prefer typescript/python expertise.
• Understand how anti-abuse bot detection fraud or traffic integrity systems analyze traffic and operate at scale.
• Are data driven and and have eye for instrumentation and monitoring.
• You can reason about how small deviations in protocol behavior timing or runtime characteristics propagate into anomaly scores.
• Are technically diverse and can adapt your tool stack quickly.
• Communicate crisply: can write a one-pager that aligns stakeholders communicates risks and drives action.
• You prefer structural resilience over reactive tactics.
• Are comfortable making hard prioritization calls with incomplete information.

• Deeply understand how network-level and browser-level signatures combine to form a holistic risk profile in modern detection systems.
• Experience with web scraping browser automation and similar.
• Experience with national security problems and workflows data platform/product work.
• Familiarity with agentic systems and what makes data “tool-call ready”
• Full stack capability. This team leans heavily into the backend but does touch the front end from time to time (React).

• Grit and creativity to keep going when faced with a roadblock.
• Success in working problems to conclusion and trying different approaches until one works.
• Ability to work autonomously.
• Demonstrated bias towards achieving an outcome even if it requires helping or doing the job of someone else on another team.
• Active TS / SCI Clearance is a plus but not needed

• 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

What We Do

Vannevar combines Silicon Valley innovation with former special operators to build AI for real-world national security outcomes. Since our founding in 2019 Vannevar has deployed its technology across 125 missions safeguarding our service members and improving our country's deterrence.We believe our military service members and intelligence officers deserve access to the best technology American innovation can offer and we are mobilizing frontier technology for this mission. Our founders have 30 years of combined experience across AI labs national security strategy intelligence agencies and special operations. We're supported by a number of leading VCs including Felicis DFJ Growth Point72 Costanoa and General Catalyst. Vannevar is one of the most capital efficient defense tech companies reaching early profitability and becoming a defense tech unicorn in 2024.

Why Work With Us

We pride ourselves on being a team of passionate low-ego professionals who share a commitment to engineering excellence and a genuine concern for the people and AI agents we deliver. Vannevar is a company that truly cares about its people and one of our core principles is "put your wellbeing first".​

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