{"id":1219234,"url":"https://alion.io/job/instrumentl-senior-backend-engineer","title":"Senior Backend Engineer","company":{"id":7296,"name":"Instrumentl","domain":"instrumentl.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/instrumentl","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":81,"open_postings":9,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.778,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-02T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Oakland, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["CA"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":138000,"max_usd":230000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":763},"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Celery","optional":false},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true},{"name":"DeepEval","optional":true},{"name":"Docker","optional":true},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":true},{"name":"GCP","optional":true},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":true},{"name":"Hybrid Search","optional":true},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true},{"name":"LangGraph","optional":true},{"name":"LlamaIndex","optional":true},{"name":"OpenAI Evals","optional":true},{"name":"Ragas","optional":true},{"name":"Recommender Systems","optional":true},{"name":"Ruby","optional":true},{"name":"Ruby on Rails","optional":true},{"name":"Semantic Kernel","optional":true},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-26T03:05:26Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-06-26","last_verified_at":"2026-10-02T18:17:35Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":98,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":98},"description":"About the role\nWe'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.\nWhat you'll do\nShip AI to production\nBuild tool-using LLM agents (task planning, function and tool calling, multi-step workflows, guardrails) for grant discovery, application drafting, and research assistance.\nTurn prototypes into resilient, observable services with clear SLAs, rollback and fallback strategies, and cost and latency budgets.\nStand up evaluation and observability so our AI stays grounded, safe, and cost-effective.\nBuild trustworthy backends\nWrite high-quality, thoroughly tested code across the backend and the data pipelines that power retrieval and evaluation.\nContribute to reliability practices: alerts, dashboards, and incident response.\nCollaborate and raise the bar\nPartner with Product, Design, and GTM on scoping, UX, and measurement.\nRun experiments (A/B, canaries), interpret results, and iterate.\nRaise engineering standards through clear, maintainable code, tests, docs, and thoughtful review.\nWhat we're looking for\nRequired\n7+ years building and shipping production backend systems in Python (FastAPI, Celery, or equivalent), taking features from prototype to production with real reliability practices like tests, observability, and rollback.\nHands-on experience building LLM features in production: tool and function calling, multi-step agent workflows, and the guardrails and evals that keep them grounded, safe, and cost-effective. This is the core of the role.\nStrong data fundamentals: SQL, schema design, and building pipelines that power retrieval and evaluation.\nThrives in a fast, scrappy startup environment with high ownership and a bias for action, speed, quality, and simplicity.\nNice to have\nTypeScript and Node, plus familiarity with Ruby on Rails (our core platform) or a willingness to learn it.\nExperience with AWS or GCP, Docker, CI/CD, and observability (logs, metrics, traces).\nRAG depth: document ingestion, chunking and windowing, embeddings, hybrid search (keyword plus vector), re-ranking, and grounded citations.\nExperience with re-rankers and cross-encoders, hybrid retrieval tuning, or search and recommendation systems.\nEvaluation mindset: designing eval suites (RAG/QA, extraction, summarization) using automated and human-in-the-loop methods, with familiarity with frameworks like Ragas, DeepEval, or OpenAI Evals.\nOrchestration frameworks: LangChain or LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or custom orchestration.\nCompensation & Benefits\nFor US-based candidates, the target salary range for this role is 175,000 - $220,000 USD, plus equity. Final compensation is determined based on experience, skillset, scope of responsibility, interview performance, and geographic location. We’re committed to paying competitively and equitably.\nFor candidates based in Canada, compensation varies by province and will be shared by your recruiter early in the process.\nBenefits\n100% covered health, dental, and vision insurance for employees (50% for dependents)\nGenerous PTO, including parental leave\n401(k)\nCompany laptop and home-office stipend\nBi-annual company retreats\nInstrumentl is evolving rapidly. You’ll always have new challenges and opportunities to grow here.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3610,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Parental leave","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Education","Health Care","Professional Services"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-25T11:35:34Z"}],"liveness":{"score":12,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.442,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":98,"expected_fill_days":41,"reasons":["conf:21","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-02T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/instrumentl-senior-backend-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/instrumentl-senior-backend-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-03T02:24:20Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2663,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2337,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-04T00:00:00Z"}}}