--- title: 'Staff/Senior Software Engineer, Document Intelligence & Data Infrastructure (Helios) at Unusual Ventures' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-senior-software-engineer-document-intelligence-data-infrastructure-helios-athna9wvddyx' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-23' --- # Staff/Senior Software Engineer, Document Intelligence & Data Infrastructure (Helios) at Unusual Ventures - **Company:** Unusual Ventures - **Location:** New York, NY - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-09-16 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-23 - **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/unusual/543f45a2-8858-4f1e-a940-fb9e42e7df8e ## Job description 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. ## About Unusual Ventures ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: A venture capital firm that provides hands-on operational support and a dedicated engagement model to help technical founders of enterprise AI software startups achieve product-market fit. - **Entity Type**: Private (venture capital fund) - **Headquarters**: Menlo Park, California, United States - **Founded**: 2018 - **Founders**: Jyoti Bansal and John Vrionis ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Venture Capital / Financial Services, with a focus on seed-stage enterprise AI software startups. - **Target customers**: Technical founders of early-stage startups (B2B through founders). - **Mission or purpose statement**: “Raise the bar for what founders should expect from their venture investors” and give technical founders the best odds of finding product-market fit. ## Products & Services - **Unusual Venture Capital**: Seed-stage investment in enterprise AI software startups. - **Unusual Founder Services**: A team of full-time operators embedded with portfolio companies to execute customer discovery, go-to-market strategy, and product-market fit work. - **Unusual Academy**: An immersive program where founders work side by side with Unusual’s founders and expert operators. - **Community & Events**: Quarterly founders events, founder academy, monthly intimate dinners with customer prospects, and go-to-market tools. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not applicable (private fund; not publicly disclosed). - **Key Metric**: 20 employees (as of latest data); 51,647 LinkedIn followers (+16.5% yearly); 10 active job postings (+100% yearly). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: LPs are primarily non-profits (hospitals, foundations, HBCUs). Portfolio companies include Rime (powers nearly 100 million phone calls/month for clients like Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, Upstart, and Asurion). Co-founder Jyoti Bansal is one of only 16 people to build two companies surpassing $100M in revenue (AppDynamics and Harness). - **Growth Signals**: Portfolio companies raise follow-on rounds at valuations “significantly above industry averages.” The firm has seen a 100% increase in job postings year-over-year. ## Competitive Advantages - **Full-time operator model**: Unlike traditional VCs, Unusual embeds dedicated operators who do the work alongside founders, not just advise. - **Concentrated portfolio**: Makes a small number of investments each year, giving each founder full attention. - **Proven founders**: Jyoti Bansal (AppDynamics, Harness) and John Vrionis (30+ billion-dollar outcomes) bring deep first-hand experience. - **The Unusual Method**: A purpose-built framework for product-market fit, refined through thousands of customer conversations. - **LP alignment**: LPs are primarily non-profits, creating a “forces for good” ethos. ## Strategic Focus - Continue investing in seed-stage enterprise AI software startups. - Expand the Unusual Method and Founder Services to increase portfolio success rates. - Build a close-knit, supportive founder community to drive repeatable PMF. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: “Forces for good” – employees work with a mission-driven team committed to founders through the hard phases. 5.0/5.0 employer rating (1 review) with high marks for work-life balance, compensation, and career growth. - **Work environment**: Small team (20 people) with high impact. Offices in Menlo Park (HQ) and San Francisco; team also distributed across the US and Australia. Remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated, but the presence of multiple offices suggests flexibility. - **Notable perks**: Opportunity to work alongside top technical founders and industry veterans; direct involvement in the product-market fit process; exposure to a concentrated portfolio of cutting-edge AI startups. - **Career path**: Roles across venture operations, sales, finance, and programs. The firm actively hires for roles that support portfolio companies (e.g., Founding Account Executive, VP of Engineering, Software Engineer) as well as internal functions (e.g., Director of Programs, VP of Sales). ## Sources 1. [unusual.vc](https://www.unusual.vc/our-story/) 2. [unusual.vc](https://www.unusual.vc/team/) 3. [unusual.vc](https://www.unusual.vc/founder-services/) 4. [jobs.lever.co/unusual](https://jobs.lever.co/unusual) 5. 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