Senior Backend Engineer - AI & LLM Systems

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance (100% for employees)

Generous PTO

401(k)

Home-office stipend

Bi-annual company retreats

Job summary

Instrumentl, a fast-growing YC-backed SaaS, is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own AI features end to end. You will build APIs, tool-using agents, and RAG pipelines enabling grant discovery, drafting, and research for 5,500+ nonprofits.

You'll ship production-grade backends with strong reliability, write tests, observability, and participate in experiments, design reviews, and cross-functional collaboration with product and design.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and shipping production backend systems with reliability practices.
• Hands-on experience building LLM features in production: tool calling and agent workflows.
• Strong data fundamentals: SQL, schema design, and retrieval/evaluation pipelines.
• Thrives in a fast, scrappy startup with high ownership and bias for action.

Responsibilities

• Ship AI to production with tool-using LLM agents and reliable services.
• Write high-quality backend code and data pipelines powering retrieval and evaluation.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, and GTM; run experiments and iterate.

Skills

Backend engineering

LLM features in production

SQL & data pipelines

Startup environment ownership

Tools

FastAPI/Celery

SQL pipelines

AWS/GCP

Docker

Job description

Instrumentl, a fast-growing YC-backed SaaS, is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own AI features end to end. You will build APIs, tool-using agents, and RAG pipelines enabling grant discovery, drafting, and research for 5,500+ nonprofits.

You'll ship production-grade backends with strong reliability, write tests, observability, and participate in experiments, design reviews, and cross-functional collaboration with product and design.