Product Engineer (Forward Deployed)

Department: Product

Location: New York

Compensation: $180K – $250K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

Product Engineer

GovSignals

New York, NY • Full-time • Hybrid

ABOUT GOVSIGNALS

We are shaping the future of government contracting with breakthrough AI‑driven solutions. We are disrupting a multi‑billion dollar industry and enabling private‑sector technologies to secure government contracts faster than ever, strengthening national security and driving economic growth.

GovSignals has built the most advanced government‑contracting AI platform available. From small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises, our platform multiplies the opportunities contractors can pursue and empowers them to deliver fully compliant, winning proposals in hours instead of months. As one of the largest aggregators of U.S. government data, we set trends rather than follow them.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We’re building the most advanced AI platform in government contracting, and the product is moving fast. We need an engineer who can move faster.

This is a forward-deployed product engineering role at a seed-stage GovTech AI company. This is not a role where you’ll sit in sprint planning for half the day and push tickets around a board. You’ll plan, build, and ship customer‑facing features end‑to‑end—from whiteboard to production—working directly with the founding team. You’ll own entire product areas, not just tasks. When something breaks at 9pm, you fix it because it’s yours.

Our stack is TypeScript across the board—Svelte/SvelteKit on the frontend, Postgres on the backend, AI SDK for model integration, deployed on Cloudflare Workers at the edge. You’ll be expected to work across all of it. We use AI pair‑programming tools aggressively (Cursor, Claude Code) and expect you to do the same. If you’re not already using AI to multiply your output, you’re already behind.

This is a role for a builder—someone who treats ambiguity as fuel, ships daily, and measures their work in user impact, not lines of code.. If you thrive when you’re given a problem and the freedom to solve it, we should talk.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Take ownership of high‑impact product areas and ship improvements daily—not weekly, not biweekly, daily

• Rapidly iterate on UI, UX, and core application logic based on real user feedback and production data

• Decompose ambiguous product goals into clear engineering plans, execute them, and measure outcomes

• Build and maintain TypeScript codebases across frontend (Svelte/SvelteKit), backend (Postgres, auth, edge logic), and infrastructure (Cloudflare Workers)

• Use AI pair‑programming tools to 5–10x your productivity—and push the team to do the same

• Collaborate directly with design, product, and the founding team to shape what gets built and why

• Monitor production metrics, troubleshoot issues in real time, and own the reliability of what you ship

• Contribute to platform architecture decisions that will define how the product scales

• Work closely with customers and CS to understand pain points, translate feedback into product decisions, and close the loop.

WHO YOU ARE

You’ve shipped real products to real users—not just built features inside someone else’s architecture. You’ve made the hard calls on what to build, how to build it, and when to cut scope. You understand that the best code is code that solves a user’s problem, not code that’s technically elegant but ships next month.

You’re fast, but not reckless. You can hold the full stack in your head—frontend reactivity, database schema, edge deployment—and make tradeoffs across all three without waiting for someone to tell you what matters.

You treat AI tools as a genuine multiplier, not a novelty. You’re already using Cursor or Claude Code in your workflow, and you have opinions about when AI helps and when it gets in the way. You’re not looking for a 9‑to‑5. You’re looking for a mission—and the ownership stake to go with it.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 5+ years of full‑stack engineering with a proven record of shipping customer‑facing features end‑to‑end

• Strong frontend TypeScript skills with modern frameworks (Svelte/SvelteKit strongly preferred; React/Next.js acceptable)

• Hands‑on Postgres and backend TypeScript experience—you’ve designed schemas, written migrations, and optimized queries

• Proficiency with AI coding assistants (Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf)—not just familiarity, actual daily use

• Ability to decompose ambiguous problems into shippable increments and communicate tradeoffs to non‑technical stakeholders

• Comfort operating in a fast‑moving, early‑stage environment where priorities shift and you own the outcome

• Experience with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and production monitoring

Bonus: Experience with AI SDK (Vercel AI SDK or similar), AI‑first UX patterns, RAG pipelines, AI agent architectures, or government/GovTech data

WHAT THIS IS NOT

This is not a role for an engineer who needs detailed specs before writing code. If you want clearly scoped Jira tickets and a project manager buffering you from stakeholders, this isn’t the right fit. If your definition of “fast” is two‑week sprints, this isn’t the right fit. If “startup hours” sounds like a red flag rather than a rallying cry, this isn’t the right fit.

We need someone who runs toward hard problems, ships under pressure, and measures their impact in product outcomes—not pull requests.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

• Base Salary: $180,000 - $250,000

• Equity: Meaningful stake in a well-funded, fast-growing startup—we want you to win big when we win big

• Benefits: 100% employer-paid medical, vision, and dental (Bronze coverage)

• Unlimited PTO

• Direct access to the founding team and end‑to‑end ownership from day one