Founding Engineer job offer in US at Hazel as Founding Full Stack Engineer

About the role

These roles are exclusively available to U.S. citizens who can obtain and maintain a U.S. government-issued Top Secret security clearance.

Who We Are:

Our mission at Hazel is simple and powerful. We use AI to help U.S. government purchasing teams buy at the speed of need with unparalleled efficiency and cost-effectiveness. It is a $2.7T problem every single year, and Hazel is at the forefront with State, Local, and EDucation (SLED) and federal government agencies.

Government procurement has moved at a glacial pace for decades, stovepiped by complex processes, regulatory capture, and overworked civil servants. The impacts are severe. Our founders saw at Palantir and BCG how lowly procurement challenges fueled wildfires across California, compromised critical U.S. national security systems, and wasted billions of dollars.

What We Are Building:

Hazel is transforming government procurement – how government agencies purchase goods and services from commercial vendors. This includes everything from copy paper to wind turbines to nuclear submarines. Our platform supports the full lifecycle of government procurement from need identification through award management. Hazel’s partners include state & local governments, schools, and federal agencies with whom we develop a product with features including:

AI labeling and categorization of solicitation text documents
Creation of solicitation documents with generative AI
Vendor discovery, labeling, and identification
Purchasing decision optimization with data-driven insights
Indexing and referencing of compliance documents

Why Join Hazel:

As a Hazel founding engineer, you will gain unparalleled access and insight into how top government stakeholders manage billion-dollar purchasing decisions. You’ll then turn those insights into product by owning development of one of the most innovative, consequential, and secure software solutions in government today. This includes building secure large language models, integrating and training them on unstructured text data from over 19,000 agencies, and building a responsive front-end cloud-hosted application. Only Hazel offers the cadence and rigor of a tech startup paired with the impact and mission of the public sector.

You’ll work side-by-side with inquisitive and driven founders who want to grow with and support you every way they can. The founders continuously promote learning (about everything) and have numerous resources available from other founders/startups/VCs.

Hazel is a mission-driven organization founded by engineers and built around delivering world-class innovation to our government partners. We strive for excellence, deliver impact, and have fun doing it.

How You Fit Us:

You care about mission. Hazel partners with agencies supporting everything from public school teachers in the classroom to warfighters in the field. We believe in products which change America for the better.

You solve problems. There’s no more time to opine on strategy and policy when our nation faces existential challenges, today. We are workhorses, not showhorses.

You are always learning. Nobody has all the answers, and the world is ever-evolving – so we must be adaptive. We bring the best practices available from all domains to meet the challenge.

You believe in team. Our team grows together, supports one another, and elevates our shared successes. We are more effective together.

About the Role:

As Hazel’s founding full stack engineer, you will be at the helm of architecting and building Hazel’s platform. You will work closely with Hazel’s customers to identify pain points to prioritize the most impactful features. You will build new features every week and be faced with many challenging technical problems. You will help define team norms, operating principles, team culture, and more. Most importantly, you join the tip of the spear in delivering effective and secure AI for the public sector.

What You’ll Do Day-to-Day:

Define, iterate, and execute on projects contributing to Hazel’s product roadmap to further accelerate customer procurement workflows
Identify areas for process and technical improvements, and take the initiative to enhance engineering processes and structures
Collaborate with colleagues, customers, and partners to understand key tactical and strategic priorities and deliver innovative, impactful solutions
Take ownership of projects, ensuring they meet rigorous standards of quality, performance, and security

What We’re Looking For:

Proven experience as a full stack engineer or similar role
Proficiency in front-end languages (e.g., HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and modern UI frameworks (e.g., React, Angular, Vue)
Strong knowledge of back-end languages (e.g., Python) and frameworks
Experience with databases (e.g., PostgreSQL)
Familiarity with version control systems (e.g., Git)
Familiarity with cloud platforms and services (e.g., AWS, Azure), server management, CI/CD tools, and software infrastructure fundamentals (networking, security, distributed systems)
Familiarity with industry standard monitoring, logging, and data management tools and best practices
Strong technical writing abilities to support user training, product documentation, and proposal writing
Excitement about bringing innovation to the public sector
Continuous drive towards learning and personal development
Travel 25-50% to co-locate with the team in New York/Boston or onsite to customer locations in the U.S.
U.S. Citizen, with the ability to obtain and maintain a Top Secret U.S. government-issued security clearance

Nice to Have Experience:

Building or contributing to “from scratch” applications that had many users
Mapping business priorities to technical priorities and vice versa
Working with or adjacent to the public sector
Presenting to senior stakeholders (e.g., C-suite, elected official, general officer) in a professional context

Base Salary Range:

$120K - $200K USD | 1% - 2% Company Equity

Estimate provided is dependent on a wide range of factors, including years of experience, relevant knowledge, and security clearance
Generous health & 401(k) benefits
Relocation Assistance
Unlimited PTO

Hazel is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status, age or any other federally protected class.

Hazel’s name is inspired by Hazel Ying Lee, one of the first Chinese-American women to serve in the U.S. military as a member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots in World War II. All Americans can break barriers, dare to innovate, and be the change.

About Hazel

Hazel has identified a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to solve this by deploying cutting-edge AI to the public sector and unlocking the full potential of our nation. We empower our partners to move with expediency against the most pressing challenges of this century including climate sustainability, great power competition, and more. Hazel builds AI for the public interest. The founders August and Elton saw this problem firsthand at Palantir and BCG, and they have enlisted a deep bench of investors from both tech and government to deploy one of the first real commercial applications of generative AI in the public sector.