Backend Engineer
US$175,000 – US$220,000 / yr base salary
Posted 26 Jun 2026
Advertised as “Senior Backend Engineer”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 7+ yrs
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Employment
- Remote
- Contract
- Full-time
| Base salary | US$175,000 – US$220,000 / yr |
|---|
Hello, we’re Instrumentl. 👋
Grants fund nonprofit work, but they also create some of the toughest operational challenges. Every grant brings its own deadlines, spending restrictions, reporting requirements, and commitments, so managing that complexity across fundraising, finance, and HR requires more than spreadsheets.
Instrumentl is the system of record for grants. We bring discovery, applications, award compliance, and grant operations into one platform, giving nonprofits a shared foundation to grow their revenue and impact. More than 6,000 nonprofits rely on Instrumentl, from local community groups to state and county governments, universities, and maybe even your local animal shelter.
We're a cash flow positive, YC-backed company building our next chapter, and we're hiring people who will shape and grow the impact of the nonprofit sector.
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 engineering standards through clear, maintainable code, tests, docs, and thoughtful review.
What we're looking for
Required