Senior Backend Engineer - AI/LLM Pipelines for Grants

Instrumentl; Oregon; On-site; USD 175,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k)

Company laptop

Home-office stipend

Bi-annual company retreats

Parental leave

Job summary

Instrumentl is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to own AI features end to end, from prototype to production, building the APIs, tool-using agents, and RAG pipelines that turn frontier LLMs into grant discovery, application drafting, and research tools our 5,500+ nonprofits rely on every day.

It's a high-ownership seat on a small team, where what you ship reaches customers fast and you help shape how we build AI here.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and shipping production backend systems in Python with reliability practices such as tests, observability, and rollback.
• Hands-on experience building LLM features in production: tool and function calling, multi-step agent workflows, guardrails and evals.
• Strong data fundamentals: SQL, schema design, and pipelines powering retrieval and evaluation.
• Thrives in a fast, scrappy startup environment with high ownership and bias for action, speed, quality, and simplicity.

Responsibilities

• Ship AI to production by building tool-using LLM agents, spec-ing SLAs, and ensuring cost and latency budgets.
• Build trustworthy backends with well-tested code and robust data pipelines for retrieval and evaluation.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, and GTM on scoping, UX, and measurement; run experiments and iterate.

Skills

Python back-end

LLM features

SQL pipelines

Observability

Fast-paced startup

Tools

FastAPI

Celery

AWS

Docker

CI/CD

Job description

Instrumentl is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to own AI features end to end, from prototype to production, building the APIs, tool-using agents, and RAG pipelines that turn frontier LLMs into grant discovery, application drafting, and research tools our 5,500+ nonprofits rely on every day.

It's a high-ownership seat on a small team, where what you ship reaches customers fast and you help shape how we build AI here.