Senior Backend Engineer — AI/LLM Platforms for Grants

Instrumentl; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 175,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Company laptop

Home-office stipend

Bi-annual company retreats

Generous PTO

Job summary

Instrumentl is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own AI features end to end, from prototype to production. You’ll build APIs, LLM agents, and RAG pipelines delivering grant discovery and research tools used by 5,500+ nonprofits daily.

You’ll ship AI to production, build trustworthy backends, and collaborate with Product, Design, and GTM while running experiments to raise engineering standards.

Qualifications

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

Responsibilities

• Ship AI to production: build tool-using LLM agents, multi-step workflows, and guarded tool calls.
• Turn prototypes into reliable, observable services with SLAs, rollback, and cost/latency budgets.
• Stand up evaluation and observability so AI stays grounded, safe, and cost-effective.
• Write high-quality backend and data pipelines powering retrieval and evaluation.
• Contribute to reliability: alerts, dashboards, and incident response.
• Collaborate with Product/Design/GTMs, run experiments, and iterate while raising engineering standards.

Skills

Python backend

LLM features

SQL pipelines

Observability

Testing & reliability

Startup ownership

Tools

TypeScript

Node.js

AWS

GCP

Docker

CI/CD

Job description

Instrumentl is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own AI features end to end, from prototype to production. You’ll build APIs, LLM agents, and RAG pipelines delivering grant discovery and research tools used by 5,500+ nonprofits daily.

You’ll ship AI to production, build trustworthy backends, and collaborate with Product, Design, and GTM while running experiments to raise engineering standards.