Senior Software Engineer, Instrumentl
GenAI
$175-220k
Plus equity
AI-powered SaaS platform for funding grants
Posted today
AI-powered SaaS platform for funding grants
101-200 employees
Posted today
$175-220k
Plus equity
101-200 employees
Company mission
To be a force-multiplier for non-profits.
Role
Who you are
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep, recent, multi-year Python and strong relational database and schema design skills
- Solid CS fundamentals and a demonstrated track record of owning complex systems end to end, from design through production reliability
- At least 1 year of hands-on experience building with modern LLMs (as an IC)
Desirable
- Real RAG depth: hybrid search (keyword plus vector), re-ranking or fusion methods, and grounded citations, tuned in production rather than read about
- Hands-on with at least one of LangChain, LangGraph, or LlamaIndex
- Vector databases beyond pgvector (Pinecone, Qdrant, Milvus)
- Built end-to-end agentic data-processing systems (crawling, dedup, structuring) with whole-system ownership
- Evaluation and observability for AI systems: golden datasets, precision vs. recall, LLM-as-judge, and drift monitoring
- Ruby on Rails (our core platform is on Rails), deep SQL, and experience with AWS or GCP, Docker, and CI/CD
- Startup experience and comfort operating in fast, scrappy, low-process environments
What the job involves
- You'll join our AI Engineering team as a Senior Engineer embedded in one of our product pods, reporting to our AI Engineering Lead
- You'll own AI features for grant discovery end to end, from the data backbone that crawls and structures messy source data, through the RAG and agentic systems that match grants to nonprofits, to production deployment and ongoing evaluation
- It's a hands-on, high-ownership seat with direct access to founders and real room to grow as the engineering team scales!
- Build tool-using LLM systems that plan, call tools, and run multi-step workflows for tasks like grant discovery, data ingestion, and research assistance
- Build agentic data-processing pipelines that crawl the web, pull and dedupe messy source data at scale, and structure it into clean, queryable databases other teams build on
- Turn prototypes into resilient production services with clear fallback, cost, and latency budgets
- Own RAG end to end: ingestion, chunking and embedding strategy, hybrid retrieval, re-ranking, citations, and grounding
- Build ranking and scoring systems that match grants to nonprofits, universities, and foundations using complex relevance techniques
- Continuously improve recall and precision and keep indices healthy as the dataset grows
- Stand up evaluation and observability so our AI is grounded, safe, and cost-effective, and treat LLM behavior as non-deterministic by design rather than as a regular API
- Partner directly with founders and your pod on undefined, complex problems with real autonomy
- Write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and build reusably so your work expands across teams
Our take
For nonprofits and academic institutions, a lot of energy and manpower is funnelled into finding the right grants and drafting their applications. This work before the work often takes hundreds of hours, and many funding bodies have as little as a 20% success rate. Instrumentl has set out to change that with its full-grant-drafting pipeline platform.
Instrumentl’s AI-powered platform works across the full grant lifecycle, assisting applicants in researching the perfect fit for funding, increasing redraft efficiency, discovering insights to align applications with the funding body's requirements and tracking and managing applications. Ultimately, then, Instrumentl sheds the need for multiple grant application tools and becomes a one-stop shop for grant consultants, non-profits and academic researchers.
It’s making a difference too, with a 2024 survey of customers revealing that its software helped them gain, on average, an extra $1.1 million a year. With a total of more than $7.7 billion raised through the platform and more than 4,500 leading organizations as customers, it’s unsurprising that Instrumentl itself has seen significant funding awarded. As the work of global non-profits grows in importance, Instrumentl is living up to its name.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Company benefits
- Competitive salary: We offer a competitive salary as part of a comprehensive benefit package including a 401k
- Equity: We're doubling year over year. This means if we keep executing, the company (and your equity) will be worth a lot
- Health insurance: 100% coverage of employee health & dental insurance plans and 50% for dependents
- Paid time off: Generous PTO policy, including parental leave, so you can rest and recharge
- Office setup: Company laptop + $500 to set up your home workstation
- Investment in you: We help fund your professional development by providing coaching and education
- Remote: The team is fully distributed (read: no office!)
- Extras!: In-person retreats, surprise food deliveries, and games to add zest to your work life
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Articles
Leadership
Katharine Corriveau
(Co-Founder)Previously a Development Specialist at UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley and a Computer Registrations Intern at the California Academy of Sciences.
Gauri Manglik
(Co-Founder & CEO)Also Member of the Board of Trustees at the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy. Previously a Venture Partner at the Pioneer Fund, Product Manager at Air BNB and was a CEO & Co-Founder at Fondu.
Angela Braren
(Co-Founder)Previously Head of New Ventures at Perfect Day, was a Fundraiser at the Global Fund for Women and was a Salmon Habitat Specialist at Project SHARE.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Instrumentl
- At Instrumentl, we pride ourselves on building a diverse team from the ground up. We’re fully committed to cultivating a safe, welcoming environment where everyone is empowered to contribute, thrive, and do their best work.
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