Software Engineer, Backend (Collection Fingerprinting)

Vannevar is a defense technology company building AI to deter adversaries. They are seeking a Backend Software Engineer to enhance their data collection systems, ensuring stability and scalability while collaborating with engineering and mission teams.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• Deep experience with browser automation, anti-bot defenses, fingerprinting and signature mitigation, distributed scraping architectures, and infrastructure designed for sensitive or misattributed environments
• Strong back-end experience and understanding of distributed systems
• Typescript/Python expertise
• Understanding of how anti-abuse, bot detection, fraud, or traffic integrity systems analyze traffic and operate at scale
• Data driven with an eye for instrumentation and monitoring
• Ability to reason about how small deviations in protocol behavior, timing, or runtime characteristics propagate into anomaly scores
• Technically diverse and can adapt tool stack quickly
• Ability to communicate crisply and write a one-pager that aligns stakeholders, communicates risks, and drives action
• Preference for structural resilience over reactive tactics
• Comfortable making hard prioritization calls with incomplete information
• Deep understanding of 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
• Active TS / SCI Clearance is a plus but not needed
• 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