Infrastructure Engineer (Software) - Nava

Nava is a consultancy and public benefit corporation working to make government services simple, effective, and accessible to all. Since 2013, federal, state, and local government agencies have trusted Nava to build transformative digital services to help people access public benefits. Meeting our mission is an opportunity to restore trust between people and public institutions. We focus on populations that are the least protected because the stakes are higher.

As a client services company, we work with government agencies to improve how people apply for benefits, navigate their health care, and more. We bill for our time, selling our expertise and problem-solving methodology to government clients. Our clients hire us to help improve their products and services so that their users and beneficiaries have a better customer experience.

These end-users—the humans who benefit from our work—are at the core of everything we do. We research beneficiaries’ needs to help our government clients better deliver on their missions, providing everyone at Nava opportunities to do meaningful, impactful work.

You will work on small teams to build scalable infrastructure for government services that millions of Americans depend on. You care deeply about working on technology that improves people’s lives but doesn’t think technology is always the answer. You are passionate about making large-scale systems secure, scalable, and fast.

You will be working within the government ecosystem, which means working, sometimes closely, with other government contractors and civil servants. Working with people outside of your company means you'll likely encounter different working styles and cultural norms. At the same time, working as part of a larger team allows us to deliver on projects of larger scale and complexity.

The government also imposes a level of bureaucracy that is typically not present in a company of our size in the private sector. We operate in a regulated environment, where checks and compliance are built into the process of building software. This can make the path to production slower and some decisions, such as tools and processes, lie outside of our control. You view these as challenges and can look for creative engineering solutions within existing constraints to provide the highest-leverage solutions to fulfill our mission.

You will be working with legacy systems. While we work to modernize government technology, we do that within an existing ecosystem. We always focus on providing real, short-term value while keeping our eyes on long-term goals. This usually means getting to know legacy systems, often with poor documentation and unreliable narrators, and trying to determine how to replicate the systems' behavior or how to integrate with these systems. This is a great opportunity for engineers who enjoy software archaeology. If you care deeply about how software systems work over time, and building systems for longevity and resilience, this work is for you.