GovSpend provides detailed federal, state, and local government purchasing data, bids, contacts, and contract information to a wide array of government vendors. We serve nearly 4,500 clients ranging from large enterprise customers to small regional vendors. Our core product offering is line-item state and local government procurement and spending data, which is unique to the market and was the only solution we sold until 2018. In recent years, we have added new products including federal data via our acquisition of Fedmine, bid notifications to alert vendors of new formal spending opportunities, and detailed contact information.
Team members Q&A.
Caden Albaugh Full-Stack Developer
Why do teams stay motivated at your company?
How much agency/impact does each individual engineer have when it comes to decision making?
Are you at risk during a financial recession If so, how are you planning for this?
How exactly have you contributed to open source so far?
How should candidates prepare for interviews?
What is the bi-weekly hackathon?
What is the mission of the company and why does it matter to you personally?
What is unique about the product that you're building?
What is your tech stack and how do think about the technology you use?
Who are your customers?
As the CEO, how do you think about hiring and retention?
Does GovSpend represent a thesis about how government is changing?
How ambitious are your goals?
How well do you pay compared to industry standards?
What kind of impact does the team have on your decisions as a CEO?
What’s interesting about the tool you’re using?
What’s the biggest misconception outsiders have about GovSpend?
Where do feature ideas come from?
How do you approach product development?
How would you describe the culture?
What’s an example of a problem that your product solves?
What’s important for engineers to know about the company?
Learn more
Useful links
- Pro tip: We've hired everyone who's contributed to our open source repos and also applied.
- This talk covers Contexture, which is the core of our tech platform and is completely open source. It's a little crusty since it's from 2017, but the narrative and core concepts are all relevant to this day.
- This is our open source functional programming utility library, endorsed by lodash on their homepage.
- This gitbook covers everything you need to know about functional programming in JS.
Team size & roles
Currently, we have about 9 Devs, 2 QA, 2 PMs, 2 Product Managers, and a handful of dev ops/ data engineers.
Meet the team →
Collaboration Practices
We try to optimize for efficiency and effectiveness over the “right” process. Currently, that involves:
- We do biweekly hackathons where the only rule is you're not allowed to work on your normal tickets - and some of our best technology and product features have come out of that process.
- All of our code is reviewed not just by other devs in the PR process, but also by a bot we've built that will autocorrect whatever we can in CI (not just formatting - things like best practices when building database schemas).
- We have a relaxed but high-performance culture - we operate with all the benefits of our early startup culture with a healthy dose of stability and a sprinkle of bigger tech processes now that we've grown.
Hours & location
- Work in US time zones
- 100% remote
- Work from anywhere
Tools we use
- Fullstack JS with react, mobx, router5, and chakra UI on the front end.
- Featherjs on the backend.
- Contexture for search UIs.
- All our data is in the latest versions of mongo, elasticsearch, redis, and we're always exploring new technologies (such as cratedb).
- We're big on functional programming, so besides using lodash/fp, we build and maintain futil, a functional programming utility library endorsed by lodash on their homepage.
- We're big on open source, with millions of downloads of our open source repositories.
Company-level stats
- VC-backed
- B2B
- CEO is a founder
- Technical founder(s)