Backend Platform Tech Lead in Palo Alto, California at Instrumental, Inc.

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.
Instrumental is hiring a Backend Platform Tech Lead to lead the building of a cloud-native, high-performing, scalable, and reliable SaaS platform to manage our distributed edge devices on factory floors, to collect and process large volumes of manufacturing data, to enable ML/AI and analytics, to support powerful yet efficient UX, and to integrate with manufacturing systems.
If you have led building a cloud platform on public cloud infrastructure and deploying it commercially at scale (ideally in a high growth startup), and if you have the itch to do it again with a bigger impact, check this out.
Who You Are:

• Experience leading the buildout of multi-tenant cloud platforms at scale, with good understanding of isolation, data growth, and performance tradeoffs.
• Successful track record of leading large, ambiguous projects end-to-end - defined the approach, sequenced the work across multiple engineers, and driven execution through to delivery.
• Skillful in leveraging and directing AI agents to improve your productivity.
• A reputable tech lead. A role model. Able to elevate the team through the quality of technical judgment and the willingness to engage deeply in design and code reviews.
• High energy. Can thrive in a fast-paced environment with a can-do attitude.

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in building large-scale cloud backend platforms. 3+ years in a technical architecture or equivalent leadership role.
• BS/MS degree in Computer Science or related majors.
• Strong proficiency in backend programming languages: Go (preferred), Rust, Java or Scala.
• Cloud-native architecture expertise (AWS preferred).
• Development and production experience on queuing and batch/stream processing (Kafka, Spark, Flink, Beam) at scale.
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases and data access.

Bonus:

• Startup experience building, scaling, and evolving SaaS platforms for IPO-scale growth.
• Has built backend platforms for highly specialized industries, such as manufacturing, networking, cybersecurity, and securities trading.

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: $217,000-$282,000. 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