Backend Engineer at Instrumental, Inc. (Palo Alto, CA)Backend Engineer

Instrumental builds the manufacturing acceleration platform behind the world's most complex electronics. We capture digital exhaust and engineering context from assembly lines — images, test logs, BOM data, performance, repair cycles — and our AI engines identify insights that are difficult or impossible for human engineers to find. We accelerate the companies building the AI era by improving manufacturing yield, throughput, and ramp. NVIDIA, Meta, L3Harris, and their manufacturing partners rely on Instrumental to accelerate new product introduction and production.

We're entering one of the most important periods in our company's history. Over the next year, we'll be rebuilding our platform layer for a scale it wasn't originally built for — and the engineer who joins now will shape that architecture as much as anyone.

Instrumental is hiring a Backend Engineer to build the services and features behind our product. You’ll join a product team alongside experienced engineers and ship backend work that customers rely on every day. This is a product engineering role, not an infrastructure role.

We’re looking for someone with 1-2 years of professional experience who is comfortable with problems that aren’t fully defined, makes thoughtful decisions within their area while knowing when to pull in others, and contributes to how the team works through code reviews, documentation, and sharing what they learn. Early-career engineers at Instrumental get real ownership quickly, and they earn it by showing up responsibly and following through.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Own the full software development lifecycle across design, implementation, testing, deployment, release and validation
• Build and improve the backend services behind our product, learning to balance shipping quickly with writing code that’s simple and easy to maintain
• Take responsibility for the quality of features in production by validating your work, investigating issues, and improving performance and reliability.
• Use AI-assisted development tools to move faster and share what works with the team
• Spot technical debt and tooling gaps in your area and bring well-reasoned proposals for what to tackle
• Work with engineers across teams to deliver features that support our product, AI, and edge systems

We’re Looking for :

• 1–2 years as a software engineer, ideally at a startup or on a small team where you shipped code that real users depended on
• You’ve owned a feature or component from start to finish, including scoping it, building it, getting it to production, and fixing it when it broke, even if someone more senior shaped the overall design
• Comfort working through problems that aren’t fully defined. You ask good questions, make reasonable calls when you don’t have every answer, and learn from how those calls turn out
• Solid working knowledge of Python or Go, plus a genuine interest in data modeling and system design and a desire to get much better at both
• You use AI-assisted development tools as part of your everyday workflow and are eager to share what’s working with your teammates
• Signs that you grow quickly, such as taking on more responsibility over time, picking up feedback fast, or being the person teammates came to for a particular area

We’re a growing team that works collaboratively, supports each other, and is energized by having an impact. We value passion and the ability to learn — you’re encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn’t match the job description precisely!

The following is a representative annual base salary range for this position within the Bay Area: $136,000-$177,000. In addition, job level and salary opportunities are evaluated during our interview process — we review each applicant's experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities. Instrumental is proud to offer a highly-rated variety of benefits, including health, vision, dental, commuter plans, and parental leave.

At Instrumental, protecting company and customer information is a shared responsibility. Employees are expected to comply with company engineering, security, access control, and privacy policies, and promptly report suspected security incidents or policy violations.