Senior Software Engineer

About Pavilion

Pavilion is on a mission to improve the lives of all Americans by making public procurement work better. Public buyers spend $2T/year of taxpayer dollars on everything local governments need, from school buses to veterinary supplies. But unlike modern online shopping, buying on behalf of the public can take months – or even years – and relies on technology that largely hasn’t changed since the ‘90s. 

We believe that government purchasers deserve technology that’s as advanced and user-friendly as the products they can use to order groceries or hire a babysitter. Our marketplace matches public buyers with suppliers they are pre-qualified to buy from, helping public servants deliver better government to residents and more businesses participate in public sector problem-solving. 

About this role

We’re recruiting a Software Engineer with strong backend skills to join our tight-knit, dynamic engineering team. You’ll help grow Pavilion’s marketplace and improve how public servants find and partner with businesses across the country. In particular, you will:

• Collaborate with an experienced team of engineers, PMs, and designers to dream up and build high-impact features. You’ll meet government buyers in person and use what you learn to inspire new workflows in contract management, purchasing, and search. 

• Build the world’s best database about who sells what to the government. Our contract database is the core of how Pavilion helps public servants, and you’ll spearhead major improvements that push us to the next level.

• Wrangle thorny technical problems. In the last year our team has tackled entity resolution, AI explainability, and the cutting edge of semantic search. You’ll master vector DBs, use AI to scale data acquisition, and push the boundaries of document understanding.

• Mentor team members, sharing your expertise to uplift our collective skills. You’ll drive improvements to our core backend technology, patterns, and best practices. 

• Shape our shared engineering and company culture. Pavilion is still an early startup, so you’ll make an outsized impact – not just on our product, but on how we work as a team.

You’re likely a good fit if you have:

• 4+ years of industry experience in web development across the stack. You’re an expert at delivering key projects on time with high quality. You have often led multi-engineer projects and maybe even teams.

• 2+ years of professional experience with Python. You’re fluent with its patterns and best practices, and you’re experienced with at least one web framework (we use Django).

• Some professional experience with AWS, SQL, and JavaScript. You’re ready to roll up your sleeves truly full-stack – whether that means scaling up servers in AWS, writing complex SQL queries against our Postgres DB, or building the frontend for a feature in React.

• A track record of being decisively impactful. You make pragmatic technical choices to ship code quickly while maintaining a high quality bar. 

• An ownership mindset. You value autonomy and seek out ownership. You want to solve hard problems and you consistently deliver impact, even when things get ambiguous.

• Strong teamwork skills. You’re a great communicator, and you do your best work as part of an empathetic, high-performing team. You’re always learning and growing fast.

Our Culture:

This hybrid role is based in our downtown San Francisco office. Most of our team members work from our office 3 days a week. When we’re in the office, we eat lunch together, hang out at Thursday team socials, and occasionally do procurement-themed scavenger hunts. Our engineering team is energetic, mission-oriented, and friendly. We’d be so excited for you to join!

Our Values:

• Empower public servants: We strive to build products and experiences that enable public sector buyers to better serve the public. Our decisions are anchored by our expertise, empathy, and relationships with public sector buyers.

• Champion ensemble: We do our best work alongside teammates that are highly collaborative, curious, and courageous. We’re hungry to improve ourselves, each other, and our organization.

• Build a big tent: We care about building spaces that are welcoming and inclusive. In our product and as a team, we put in extra effort to support and enable diverse groups and move the public sector procurement industry forward.

Pavilion’s compensation philosophy: We strive to achieve compensation that is fair, competitive, and right-sized to our company. For our size and stage, we aim to be generous with equity and meet needs with salary. We make our best offer to candidates up-front.

• Salary: The expected salary range for this position is $162k - $173k
  
  
• Equity: We offer a higher than average equity package compared to companies in our stage
  

Join our team to deliver business and social impact at the speed of a startup and the scale of government. 

Equal Opportunity

We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace committed to building a team culture that celebrates diversity and inclusion.