Senior Data Engineer

Job Description

👋 Hello, we’re Instrumentl.

We’re a mission-driven startup helping the nonprofit sector to drive impact, and we’re well on our way to becoming the #1 most-loved grant discovery and management tool.

About us:

Instrumentl is a hypergrowth YC-backed startup with over 4,000 nonprofit clients, from local homeless shelters to larger organizations like the San Diego Zoo and the University of Alaska. We are building the future of fundraising automation, helping nonprofits to discover, track, and manage grants efficiently through our SaaS platform.

Our charts are dramatically up-and-to-the-right 📈 — we’re cash flow positive and doubling year-over-year, with customers who love us (NPS is 65+ and Ellis PMF survey is 60+). Join us on this rocket ship to Mars!

Senior Data Engineer

We’re looking for a Senior Data Engineer to help scale and evolve our data platform, which is in its early stages. You’ll play a key role in shaping the architecture, improving reliability, and building the systems that power data across the company. This is a high-impact opportunity to bring structure and scalability to an existing foundation—ideal for someone who enjoys improving systems, making architectural decisions, and driving best practices.

You’ll partner closely with engineering, product, and business teams to design and implement scalable systems for data ingestion, storage, processing, and analytics. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys high ownership, thrives in ambiguity, and wants to have a lasting impact on foundational infrastructure.

What you’ll do

• Design and scale our data platform including pipelines, models, and orchestration frameworks

• Develop scalable ETL/ELT pipelines for ingesting data from APIs, databases, and event streams

• Define and implement systems for data ingestion, storage, processing, and transformation

• Build and manage workflow orchestration using tools like Airflow

• Build semantic layer as well as dashboards

• Establish best practices for data modeling, testing, and quality

• Partner with stakeholders to shape data requirements and enable BI and analytics use cases

• Optimize systems for performance, scalability, and cost from day one

Apply software engineering principles (testing, CI/CD, modular design) to data infrastructure

What you bring

• A min of 5+ years of software engineering experience with the last 2-3 years in data engineering, ideally including early-stage or 0→1 environments

• Strong programming skills in Python

• Advanced proficiency in SQL

• Proven experience building ETL/ELT pipelines end-to-end

• Experience with orchestration tools like Airflow

• Deep understanding of the data lifecycle: ingestion → storage → processing → transformation → serving

• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)

• Experience supporting BI tools (Looker, Tableau, etc.)

• Familiarity with modern data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift)

Nice to have

• Experience working in startup environments

• Experience with streaming pipelines (Kafka, Kinesis)

• Exposure to ML/AI data pipelines

• Familiarity with Ruby and Rails

• Experience with data analytics and data science concepts

What success looks like

• A scalable, reliable data foundation

• Clear, well-documented data models used across teams

• The data platform is flexible and ready to scale with company growth

• Stakeholders have trusted, accessible data for decision-making

Compensation & Benefits

For US-based candidates, our target salary band is $150,000 - $180,000/yr Salary decisions consider experience, location, and technical depth.

• 100% covered health, dental, and vision insurance for employees (50% for dependents)

• Generous PTO, including parental leave

•  401(k)

•  Company laptop and home-office stipend

• Bi-Annual Company retreats for in-person collaboration

Instrumentl is evolving rapidly. You’ll always have new challenges and opportunities to grow here.

$150,000 - $180,000 a year

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.