Unusual Ventures Logo

Unusual Ventures

Staff/Senior Software Engineer, Document Intelligence & Data Infrastructure (Helios)

Posted One Month Ago
In-Office
New York, NY
Senior level
In-Office
New York, NY
Senior level
Build and operate Helios’s acquisition and document-processing infrastructure, including web crawlers, connectors, fault-tolerant pipelines, multilingual document and media processing, OCR, extraction, transcription, and enrichment. Establish data contracts, provenance, versioning, observability, security, and correction propagation across distributed systems. Scale batch and real-time CPU/GPU workloads while supporting international sources and restricted environments.
The summary above was generated by AI

Staff/Senior Software Engineer, Document Intelligence & Data Infrastructure

New York City | Full-time | On-site in SoHo, five days per week

Reports to the CTO and works directly with the founding team

ABOUT HELIOS

Helios is building a new kind of company to solve America’s hardest problems, starting with the government interaction layer.

Government shapes every consequential market, but the infrastructure connecting public institutions and private organizations remains fragmented, manual, and difficult to navigate. Helios is rebuilding that layer.

Our core platform, Proxi, gives organizations the intelligence they need to understand what government is doing, why it matters, and what to do next. From that foundation, we design and deploy secure, mission-specific systems for government agencies, enterprises, and institutions operating in complex and highly regulated environments.

We bring together frontier AI, deep public-sector expertise, and forward-deployed execution. Our team includes leaders and builders from the White House, U.S. Department of State, Datadog, and Microsoft. We are backed by leading institutional investors and trusted by organizations working on high-stakes problems across government and industry.

MISSION

Build and operate the acquisition and processing infrastructure that turns global public-sector and open-source data into reliable, searchable intelligence. This role owns the path from source discovery and collection through normalization, extraction, enrichment, and publication. You will expand our platform to include new countries, languages, institutions, and source formats covering many additional areas of open source intelligence to advance Proxi’s natural capabilities. We are looking for a senior engineer who has built and operated large-scale acquisition or document-processing systems in production.

Expected areas of expertise:

  • Web crawlers and connectors for continuously changing international sources.

  • Fault-tolerant pipelines with reliable scheduling, recovery, replay, and backfill capabilities.

  • Processing complex documents, structured files, images, audio, and video across languages.

  • Stable schemas, source lineage, correction propagation.

  • Operating secure, observable, scalable, and cost-efficient processing systems across cloud and restricted environments.

  • Document conversion, OCR, layout analysis, and structural extraction across complex file formats.

  • Multilingual audio, video, and document processing with reliable alignment and attribution.

  • Scalable inference infrastructure for batch and real-time processing across CPU and GPU workloads.

  • End-to-end provenance, versioning, correction propagation, and reproducible reprocessing.

  • Secure handling of untrusted content with rigorous quality evaluation, observability, and cost controls.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Expand Proxi’s ingestion and document-processing platform from source acquisition through downstream publication.

  • Construct crawling and connector infrastructure required to discover, acquire, and continuously maintain international data sources.

  • Scale the distributed processing environment that supports document conversion, extraction, transcription, enrichment, replay, and backfills.

  • Establish common data contracts that normalize heterogeneous and multilingual sources without discarding their jurisdictional context or provenance.

  • Maintain pipeline reliability, security, observability, and cost efficiency while ensuring corrections propagate through every downstream system.

  • Build and operate real-time audio intelligence pipelines for low-latency multilingual transcription, speaker attribution, timestamp alignment, and confidence-calibrated tone analysis across live and recorded media.

NICE TO HAVE

  • Experience building international public-sector data pipelines across languages and jurisdictions.

  • Production experience with real-time transcription, speaker diarization, and tone or prosody analysis.

  • Experience operating large-scale web acquisition against complex and frequently changing sources.

  • Familiarity with legal, legislative, regulatory, archival, or similarly difficult corpora.

  • Experience deploying secure processing systems in GovCloud, air-gapped, or other restricted environments.

WORKING AT HELIOS

This is a full-time, in-person role based in our SoHo office in New York City. Team members are expected to work from the office five days per week when they are not deployed with customers.

Certain customer engagements may require background checks, security reviews, access approvals, or eligibility for a U.S. government security clearance. Some projects may be subject to U.S. citizenship or other customer-specific access requirements.

We're not looking for passengers; we want driven innovators with a hunger to build from the ground up - obsessed with pushing the boundaries of natural language understanding, document processing, and personalized relevance.

Helios is a fast-moving startup with ambitious goals. This is not a conventional 9-to-5 role. We expect flexibility during critical deployment periods, customer incidents, product launches, and other company-critical work. In return, this role offers unusual ownership, direct access to consequential institutions, and the opportunity to build systems that affect how major decisions are made.

HOW WE WORK

  • Own outcomes, not just assigned tasks. Identify what needs to happen and drive it through completion.

  • Move quickly without lowering the standard. Speed and rigor are complementary.

  • Stay close to the mission and the user. The best decisions begin with the real problem.

  • Work across boundaries. Everyone contributes beyond the narrow limits of a job title.

  • Communicate directly. We value clear thinking, honest feedback, and low-ego collaboration.

  • Build for the real world. Our systems must perform in complex, regulated, and high-stakes environments.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Helios is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate candidates based on their abilities, experience, and potential to contribute to our mission. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law.

Similar Jobs

28 Minutes Ago
In-Office or Remote
142K-361K Annually
Senior level
142K-361K Annually
Senior level
Cloud • Information Technology • Consulting
Owns strategic enterprise client relationships for RapidScale, driving account growth, retention, revenue expansion, and customer outcomes. Develops executive relationships, strategic account plans, and complex multi-year services engagements. Leads sales cycles, forecasts pipeline, coordinates solution engineering and delivery teams, resolves escalations, and aligns managed and professional cloud services with client business objectives.
Top Skills: AWSGCPHybrid CloudManaged ServicesAzurePrivate CloudPublic CloudVMware
36 Minutes Ago
In-Office or Remote
USA
140K-220K Annually
Senior level
140K-220K Annually
Senior level
Cloud • Information Technology • Productivity • Security • Software • App development • Automation
Lead technical pre-sales engagements for large LATAM enterprise customers. Partner with account teams and channel partners, conduct Spanish-language discovery sessions and demonstrations, advocate for Atlassian Rovo and Teamwork Graph, architect customized solutions, and translate complex business challenges into measurable customer value. Build executive relationships, influence cross-functional teams, provide market feedback to Product Management, and support complex, high-stakes enterprise deals.
Top Skills: Artificial IntelligenceAtlassian RovoCloud Software PlatformsTeamwork Graph
36 Minutes Ago
In-Office or Remote
132K-208K Annually
Senior level
132K-208K Annually
Senior level
Cloud • Information Technology • Productivity • Security • Software • App development • Automation
Provides strategic and technical guidance to enterprise customers using Atlassian products and solutions. Partners with stakeholders to address business challenges, improve enterprise agility, map operating practices to product capabilities, and implement strategy and planning tools. Creates prescriptive solution content, supports adoption and enablement, advocates for customer needs internally, and identifies expansion opportunities. The role requires significant SaaS and customer-facing experience, expertise in enterprise strategy and Agile tools, AI integration familiarity, and up to 30% travel.
Top Skills: Agentic AiAgileAlignAtlassianAzure DevopsFocusJira PlansMcpRallyRational Team ConcertRovoSaaSStrategy CollectionTalentVersionone

What you need to know about the Boston Tech Scene

Boston is a powerhouse for technology innovation thanks to world-class research universities like MIT and Harvard and a robust pipeline of venture capital investment. Host to the first telephone call and one of the first general-purpose computers ever put into use, Boston is now a hub for biotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence — though it’s also home to several B2B software giants. So it’s no surprise that the city consistently ranks among the greatest startup ecosystems in the world.

Key Facts About Boston Tech

  • Number of Tech Workers: 269,000; 9.4% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
  • Major Tech Employers: Thermo Fisher Scientific, Toast, Klaviyo, HubSpot, DraftKings
  • Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, software, aerospace
  • Funding Landscape: $15.7 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
  • Notable Investors: Summit Partners, Volition Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, MassVentures, Highland Capital Partners
  • Research Centers and Universities: MIT, Harvard University, Boston College, Tufts University, Boston University, Northeastern University, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, National Bureau of Economic Research, Broad Institute, Lowell Center for Space Science & Technology, National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories

Sign up now Access later

Create Free Account

Please log in or sign up to report this job.

Create Free Account