Software Engineer

Instead

$200K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 3+ years of professional software engineering experience
  • Strong proficiency in Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, or similar languages
  • Experience with modern frontend frameworks like Vue.js or React
  • Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and CI/CD practices
  • Product-minded with a focus on user experience
  • Willingness to work onsite in San Francisco

Responsibilities

  • Build and own features end-to-end on our full-stack platform
  • Collaborate with product and design teams to ship user-facing features
  • Develop and maintain tax calculation engines
  • Enhance e-filing infrastructure
  • Work with a distributed engineering team from SF and India

Benefits

  • Opportunity to directly impact tax professionals' workflows
  • Exposure to AI-powered solutions in a crucial industry
  • Collaborative work environment with a global team
  • Hands-on experience in modern technology stacks
  • Ability to influence product direction and user experience
Full Job Description
The Role

You'll build the AI-powered tax platform that hundreds of accounting firms use every day. You'll work across the full stack, shipping features on our customer-facing product and building internal tooling that powers our engineering team. This is production AI work, not research. You'll be writing code that handles real tax returns, real deadlines, and real customer data.

Our stack: Vue, Nuxt, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS on the frontend. Go, Docker on AWS ECS/Fargate, and PostgreSQL on AWS RDS on the backend. For AI, we use Cursor, Claude Code, Helicone, Gemini, and OpenAI, and we're constantly evaluating new tools.
What You'll Do
  • Ship full-stack product features end to end for our live customer platform
  • Build and integrate AI-powered components including production-level inference and prompt engineering
  • Make key product improvements based on customer feedback and usage analytics
  • Solve critical product bugs across the full stack with high urgency during tax season
  • Create tools and internal platforms that enhance the productivity of Instead's engineering and product teams
  • Partner with US-based product teams to translate customer needs into technical solutions
  • Contribute to architecture decisions as the team scales
What You Bring
  • 3+ years of software development experience
  • Proficiency in full-stack development with a strong understanding of web frameworks, backend systems, and cloud infrastructure
  • Experience building and shipping production software that real customers depend on
  • High attention to detail. Tax work has consequences, and our code needs to be right
  • Fast learner who thrives in a fast-paced environment where priorities shift quickly
  • Experience with AI/ML frameworks, prompt engineering, or AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) is a strong plus
  • Experience with our stack (Vue/Nuxt, Go, AWS, PostgreSQL) is a plus but not required
What Makes Someone Exceptional
  • You ship fast without sacrificing quality. You know when to cut corners and when the details matter
  • You've built customer-facing products at scale and understand what it means when real users depend on your code
  • You actively use AI tools in your development workflow. You see AI as a force multiplier, not a novelty
  • You can work across the full stack and context-switch between frontend polish and backend infrastructure
  • You care about the product, not just the code. You understand why a feature matters to customers, not just how to build it
Compensation

$200,000 base + equity
Location

San Francisco (on-site)

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