Sr. Software Engineer - Backend/Full-stack (Copy)

Instrumental, Inc.•Palo Alto, CA

1d•$136,000 - $177,000

About The Position

Instrumental builds a manufacturing acceleration platform for complex electronics, using manufacturing data and AI to help customers improve yield, throughput, and ramp. The company is rebuilding its platform layer to support greater scale. This is a product engineering role focused on building the backend services and features customers rely on, rather than an infrastructure role. The engineer will work on a product team alongside experienced engineers and contribute to shaping the platform architecture.

Requirements

1–2 years of professional software engineering experience, ideally at a startup or on a small team shipping code used by real users.
Experience owning a feature or component from scoping and implementation through production and fixing issues, with overall design guidance potentially provided by a more senior engineer.
Comfort working through problems that are not fully defined; asks good questions, makes reasonable decisions with incomplete information, and learns from outcomes.
Solid working knowledge of Python or Go.
Genuine interest in data modeling and system design, with a desire to improve in both.
Uses AI-assisted development tools as part of everyday work and is eager to share effective practices with teammates.
Evidence of rapid growth, such as taking on increasing responsibility, responding quickly to feedback, or becoming a go-to teammate for an area.

Nice To Haves

Experience at a startup or on a small team.

Responsibilities

Own the full software development lifecycle, including design, implementation, testing, deployment, release, and validation.
Build and improve backend services, balancing speed of delivery with simple, maintainable code.
Validate work, investigate production issues, and improve feature quality, performance, and reliability.
Use AI-assisted development tools and share effective practices with the team.
Identify technical debt and tooling gaps in the engineer’s area and propose well-reasoned improvements.
Collaborate with engineers across teams to deliver features supporting product, AI, and edge systems.
Contribute to team practices through code reviews, documentation, and sharing lessons learned.