Senior Backend Engineer, AI & LLM Pipelines

Instrumentl; Oakland (CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision insurance

401(k)

Home-office stipend

Company laptop

Bi-annual retreats

Job summary

Instrumentl is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own AI features end to end, from prototype to production. You will build APIs, LLM-powered agents, and RAG pipelines that support grant discovery, drafting, and research for 5,500 nonprofits.

You will work on high-ownership projects in a fast-paced startup, shipping reliable services, and partnering with product and design to shape AI infrastructure. Salary ranges and benefits are included.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of production backend experience in Python (FastAPI or Celery).
• Experience building LLM features in production with tool calling and multi-step agent workflows.
• Strong data fundamentals: SQL, schema design, and data pipelines for retrieval/evaluation.
• Thrives in a fast, scrappy startup environment with high ownership.

Responsibilities

• Ship AI to production by building LLM agents and tool calling workflows.
• Turn prototypes into reliable services with SLAs, rollback, and cost controls.
• Improve observability, metrics, and incident response.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, and GTM; run experiments and iterate.

Skills

Python backend

LLM features in production

SQL / data pipelines

Startup ownership & speed

Tools

FastAPI

Celery

Docker

CI/CD

Job description

Instrumentl is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own AI features end to end, from prototype to production. You will build APIs, LLM-powered agents, and RAG pipelines that support grant discovery, drafting, and research for 5,500 nonprofits.

You will work on high-ownership projects in a fast-paced startup, shipping reliable services, and partnering with product and design to shape AI infrastructure. Salary ranges and benefits are included.