Associate Software Engineer

We're looking for a scrappy associate software engineer to join our partners small, tight-knit team of 6 in NYC, already seeing strong revenue traction. You'll join a fast-growing team backed by Bessemer Venture Partners with $4M in funding and led by a repeat founder with a successful exit. They're already seeing strong revenue traction and moving incredibly fast.

• Government tech startup that builds AI-powered software to replace legacy systems for state and local governments. They're the "Costco for government software" - doing both reselling and custom builds.
• You'll join a fast-growing team backed by Bessemer Venture Partners with $4M in funding and led by a repeat founder with a successful exit. They're already seeing strong revenue traction and moving incredibly fast.
• This role lets you own entire mini-startups within the company - you'll build demos that win deals and then turn them into real products. It's zero-to-one building with massive context switching and AI-first development.

You might be a fit if you are

Very entrepreneurial

• You think like a founder: “What is the ACTUAL product need here?”
• You’re comfortable with ambiguity and can self-direct without a fully specced ticket
• You like talking to non-technical users (gov folks, ops teams) and translating messy workflows into simple software

Very fast at building

• You are genuinely quick with all resources at your disposal. AI + an hour + your incoming knowledge is all you need to get from 0 to 80%
• You care about demo-feedback loops: basic UX, narrative flow, sample data, and edge-case handling at first; with feedback to build on
• You’re comfortable cutting scope ruthlessly and building back up to full product needs

Very ops-oriented

• You think in terms of systems: queues, retries, monitoring, “what happens when this runs 1,000 times a day across 20 customers?”
• You’re excited by the challenge of running AI pipelines with many humans in the loop—support, analysts, case workers, etc.
• You enjoy building internal tools as much as external-facing features.

What we’re looking for

Must-haves

• Project history – what have you built in a vacuum?
• Strong fluency in Backend (Python and/or Node) and modern Frontend development (React, TailwindCSS, or similar)
• Hands-on experience using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Factory, Codex, Gemini-CLI, etc.) as part of your workflow.
• Comfort spinning up small full-stack apps: API, data model, simple UI, deployment.
• US work authorization; US citizen
• Willingness to work in-person in Flatiron, NYC (5 days/week).

Nice-to-haves

• Experience at a startup or as a founder / founding engineer.
• Familiarity with long-running workflows, background workers, queues, or “agentic” AI orchestration.
• Comfort talking to customers and sitting in on live demos.

What this role is not

• This is not a pure front-end role. You should be comfortable owning full-stack demos and internal tools.
• This is not a big-company engineering job with long roadmaps and narrow scopes. You’ll be context-switching between products, domains, and codebases not just weekly but daily + hourly. You should enjoy playing whac-a-mole.

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Cabana partners with breakout and high-growth startups all across the US. If you're exploring what's next, be sure to follow the company page for job postings.