Senior Platform Engineer - AI-Driven Backend & Infra

Instrumental Inc.; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 221,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, Vision, Dental

Commuter plans

Parental leave

Job summary

Instrumental Inc. is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to own the platform layer—services, pipelines, and infrastructure that powering our engineering teams in the Bay Area.

You will drive end-to-end production systems, improve reliability, observability, and security, and leverage AI-assisted tools to accelerate development velocity and iteration speed.

If you thrive in a hands-on startup environment and can influence engineering practices, apply to join our growing team.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in backend or platform engineering, startup experience required.
• Own production systems end-to-end from design to operations.
• Fluent in Python or Go; other backend languages a plus.
• Experience with data modeling and data processing pipelines.
• Leads AI tool adoption to improve productivity and outcomes.
• Strong communication and cross-team collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Own the full software development lifecycle across design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations.
• Build and evolve core platform services with an emphasis on pragmatism, maintainability, and operational excellence.
• Improve system simplicity, reliability, security, observability, incident detection, and response.
• Leverage AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity and iteration speed.
• Identify, evaluate, and prioritize new tools, technologies, and technical debt based on ROI.
• Collaborate across engineering teams to ensure platform capabilities meet product, AI, and edge system needs.

Skills

Backend engineering

Platform ownership

Startup experience

Communication

AI tooling adoption

Data modeling

Data pipelines

Tools

Python

Go

Job description

Instrumental Inc. is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to own the platform layer—services, pipelines, and infrastructure that powering our engineering teams in the Bay Area.

You will drive end-to-end production systems, improve reliability, observability, and security, and leverage AI-assisted tools to accelerate development velocity and iteration speed.

If you thrive in a hands-on startup environment and can influence engineering practices, apply to join our growing team.