Backend Engineer, Security Platform

Vannevar is a defense technology company building AI to deter our adversaries. In the 21st century, conflict moves at algorithmic speed and foresight equals firepower. Our agentic AI is purpose-built to compete with China—from cross-Strait conflict to gray zone coercion. Trained on the most mission-relevant datasets in defense, our technology models adversary behavior, simulates campaigns, and recommends the best course of action to decision makers. Our AI systems are some of the most trusted in the industry and actively used on the front lines of the Indo-Pacific to keep the peace and save lives.

Exceptional technology starts with exceptional people. Vannevar is a small agile team combining world-class engineers with veteran strategists who bring deep expertise in defense and tradecraft. We’re building a company defined by mission impact, user empathy, and disciplined growth. In just three years, we grew from $3M to $80M in ARR, achieved early profitability, and reached unicorn status—proving that disruption doesn’t require an ego, and staying power doesn’t mean standing still.

About the role

At Vannevar, we’re building the next generation of mission software that powers decision-making across the national security, defense, and intelligence communities. Protecting the sensitive data and workflows behind those missions is foundational to our platform. The Security Platform team builds the authentication, authorization, and identity infrastructure that ensures the right people and services have access to the right resources—securely, reliably, and with minimal friction.

In this role, you’ll join a small, cross-functional team to own backend services, authorization engines, and data models. You’ll partner closely with product engineers, compliance and application security teams, forward deployed engineers, and mission users to build identity and access management capabilities that are intuitive, scalable, and deeply integrated into the product experience. This is a high-impact opportunity to shape how Vannevar approaches identity and permissions, build reusable platform capabilities, and enable new customer workflows across our products.

 

What you’ll do

• Drive implementation, adoption, and ongoing evolution of core platform permission infrastructure and shared services.
• Lead mission-critical projects to build and scale foundational platform auth capabilities.
• Partner closely with engineers across the organization to develop and standardize security platform solutions that address cross-product challenges.
• Collaborate with compliance and Mission stakeholders to define and enforce standards for access control, data protection, and system integrity.
• Influence architecture, technology selection, and engineering standards across the company.
• Grow your engineering skills by solving complex, high-impact problems in security platform and infrastructure systems. 

 

What we’re looking for

• You have 5+ years of backend development experience, including hands on experience building identity and access management systems that other product teams rely on.
• You have strong system design skills and can make thoughtful tradeoffs among performance, reliability, scalability, and cost.
• You have led cross-team technical initiatives spanning multiple systems and driven adoption through influence.
• You bring a security-first mindset and are comfortable operating with high discipline in sensitive environments.
• You communicate complex technical concepts clearly to a broad audience, including engineers, cross-functional partners, and end users.
• U.S. Person status is required, as this role requires access to U.S.-only data systems.

 

What we offer

The salary range for this position is $150,000 - $215,000 + equity. Within the range, individual pay is determined by experience, relevant education, and/or training.

We’re proud to offer competitive benefits that support our employees. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Remote friendly with WeWork access
• Unlimited PTO, shared downtime during the federal holiday calendar, and company-wide off time at the end of each year
• 401(k) match
• Lifestyle & wellbeing stipends
• Salary top-up during military reserve duty
• Fully paid parental leave
• Child and pet care reimbursement during travel

Vannevar is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.   We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply, even if you don't feel like you're a perfect fit. If you're passionate about contributing to our mission, we'd love to hear from you!   IMPORTANT NOTICE
We are committed to protecting the privacy of all applicants. Official emails from the company will come from an @vannevarlabs.com domain. Under no circumstances will a legitimate representative from our company contact you to request passwords, financial information, or other sensitive personal data. Please be vigilant of potential scams.