Manufacturing Intelligence Engineer in Palo Alto, California at Instrumental, Inc.

As a Manufacturing Intelligence Engineer, you’ll sit at the frontier of Instrumental’s next-generation AI product — using Solve to turn messy manufacturing data into fast, evidence-backed root cause investigations — eliminating “Chip to Token” bottlenecks. You’ll work directly with customer engineering teams, CSPs, and OEMs to answer high-stakes questions, drive corrective actions at manufacturing sites, and prove measurable impact on yield, throughput, bonepile recovery, and time-to-market. This is a role for someone who wants to be both an engineer and a detective: applying sharp technical judgment on top of AI to help the world’s most advanced hardware teams move faster.
Manufacturing advanced electronics requires understanding millions of signals generated across complex assembly processes. Instrumental builds systems that capture and analyze those signals — images, test results, and process data — enabling engineers to discover failures, identify root causes, and deploy production controls that improve yield and product maturity. Leading companies such as NVIDIA, Cisco, and Meta rely on Instrumental to accelerate new product development and scale manufacturing across global factories. Instrumental has become mission-critical for manufacturers building and scaling the next generation of AI infrastructure hardware.
What We're Looking For:

• You have hands-on experience in electronics or semiconductor manufacturing — whether in failure analysis, test engineering, process engineering, quality, hardware development, or a similar technical role.
• You're comfortable working with messy, real-world manufacturing data to identify patterns, form hypotheses, and determine what evidence is needed before recommending action.
• You know how to investigate root cause across production data, test data, supply chain data, process history, product context, and customer-reported symptoms.
• You don't stop at analysis — you drive corrective actions and can demonstrate measurable impact on yield, failure analysis cycle time, throughput, scrap/rework, or bonepile recovery.
• You communicate complex technical findings clearly to diverse audiences: engineering teams, OEM/CSP stakeholders, manufacturing operators, and internal teammates.
• You're excited to work with next-generation AI tools and apply rigorous engineering judgment to AI-generated findings.
• You're product-minded — you can spot workflow friction, identify product gaps, and recognize repeatable customer use cases while staying focused on delivering outcomes.
• You thrive in ambiguity, take ownership without waiting for perfect instructions, and are energized by solving hard technical problems with real customer stakes.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Own customer investigations using Instrumental Solve, turning ambiguous manufacturing questions into structured analyses, validated findings, and recommended next steps.
• Work directly with customer engineering teams, OEMs, CSPs, and manufacturing stakeholders to investigate issues impacting yield, throughput, failure analysis time, bonepile recovery, scrap/rework, or time-to-market.
• Use manufacturing data across production, test, supply chain, environment, product, logs, and customer-reported issues to identify patterns, form hypotheses, and pressure-test likely root causes.
• Drive corrective actions with customer teams and manufacturing sites, ensuring findings lead to real changes in process, product, supplier, or operational behavior — building credibility and driving sustained Solve adoption along the way.
• Quantify the impact of Solve investigations by connecting actions taken to measurable improvements in customer manufacturing metrics.
• Partner closely with Instrumental Product and Engineering to identify product gaps, repeatable use cases, and workflow improvements that make Solve more valuable across customers.
• Help define how Instrumental delivers Solve outcomes as the product scales, including investigation playbooks, customer workflows, and best practices for closing the loop from insight to impact.

We’re a growing team that works collaboratively, supports each other, and is energized by having 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: $155,000-$169,000. This position is also eligible for performance-based cash bonuses and growth-stage equity participation. In addition, job level and salary opportunities are evaluated through our interview process – we review the experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of each applicant.
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. All employees are expected to comply with company security and privacy policies and promptly report suspected security incidents or policy violations.