Senior Backend Engineer

Hello, we’re Instrumentl. 👋 Nonprofits do some of the most important work in the world, and most of them are still managing grants in spreadsheets. We're fixing that. Instrumentl is a profitable, hypergrowth, YC-backed SaaS platform building the operating system for grant-funded organizations.

More than 5,500 nonprofits use Instrumentl to discover, track, and win grant funding, from local community organizations to the San Diego Zoo and the University of Alaska. Collectively they’ve moved over $1 billion through our platform.

We're growing more than 40% year over year, customers love us (Ellis PMF 60+), and we're hiring people who want to build something that matters. About the role We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own AI features end to end, from rapid prototype to production and the evaluation that keeps them honest.

You'll build 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.

What you'll do Ship AI to production Build tool-using LLM agents (task planning, function and tool calling, multi-step workflows, guardrails) for grant discovery, application drafting, and research assistance.

Turn prototypes into resilient, observable services with clear SLAs, rollback and fallback strategies, and cost and latency budgets. Stand up evaluation and observability so our AI stays grounded, safe, and cost-effective.

Build trustworthy backends Write high-quality, thoroughly tested code across the backend and the data pipelines that power retrieval and evaluation. Contribute to reliability practices: alerts, dashboards, and incident response.

Collaborate and raise the bar Partner with Product, Design, and GTM on scoping, UX, and measurement. Run experiments (A/B, canaries), interpret results, and iterate. Raise engineeri