Senior Platform Engineer - End-to-End, AI-Driven

Canaan Partners; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 185,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Vision, dental coverage

Commuter plans

Parental leave

Job summary

Instrumental is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer in Palo Alto to own the platform layer—services, pipelines, and infrastructure that power our product. You will drive design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations across the full software lifecycle.

The ideal candidate has 5+ years in backend or platform engineering, startup experience, and fluency in Python or Go. You will collaborate across teams, adopt AI tooling, and help improve reliability, observability, and performance

Qualifications

• 5+ years backend or platform engineering experience; startup experience required
• Ownership of production systems - from design through deployment and operations
• Pragmatic, well-reasoned technical decisions and can articulate tradeoffs
• Fluent in Python or Go; experience with other backend languages is a plus
• Experience with data modeling and data processing pipelines
• Leads the way in AI tool adoption on their teams to improve development productivity and outcomes
• Communicates clearly and collaborates effectively across teams

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

Python

Go

Backend engineering

Platform engineering

Data modeling

Data pipelines

AI tooling

Team collaboration

Job description

Instrumental is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer in Palo Alto to own the platform layer—services, pipelines, and infrastructure that power our product. You will drive design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations across the full software lifecycle.

The ideal candidate has 5+ years in backend or platform engineering, startup experience, and fluency in Python or Go. You will collaborate across teams, adopt AI tooling, and help improve reliability, observability, and performance