About the role
## Company context Instantly builds products that help businesses run and scale email outreach. We operate in a fast-moving environment where small teams own meaningful systems, work close to customers, and ship improvements that reach production quickly. ## What this person will own - Translate incomplete customer, product and operational context into a clear technical plan and the smallest useful release. - Design and build full-stack systems across frontend, backend services, APIs, databases, queues, integrations and infrastructure. - Work directly with users or internal operators when needed, diagnose the real workflow, and close the loop with deployed fixes. - Make architecture and reliability decisions that fit the current stage of the product rather than optimising for theoretical perfection. - Own rollout, monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, rollback and follow-up improvements. - Raise the engineering bar through strong judgment, pragmatic reviews, clear written reasoning and direct technical leadership. ## The mandate A senior hands-on engineering role, not a people-management position. Depending on depth the title may map to SDE-3, Senior Software Engineer, Principal Engineer or Forward Deployed Engineer. The common bar is independent ownership of difficult, ambiguous problems and measurable production outcomes. ## What this person must demonstrate - Repeated evidence of shipping important production systems or products end to end. - Strong computer-science and software-engineering foundations: data modelling, concurrency, distributed-system failure modes, security and performance. - Exceptional analytical debugging — forms hypotheses, gathers evidence, narrows the mechanism, validates the fix in production. - Scope discipline: knows what not to build, separates immediate delivery from future architecture, avoids unnecessary rewrites. - Fast, thoughtful use of Claude, Codex or similar AI coding tools while retaining full ownership of correctness, security and design. ## Role profiles we will consider - **SDE-3 / Senior Software Engineer** — independently delivers complex cross-stack work and handles production ownership with minimal direction. - **Principal Engineer** — solves high-leverage technical problems across systems, simplifies architecture, influences standards without becoming a process bottleneck. - **Forward Deployed Engineer** — works close to customers or operators, investigates messy real-world workflows, turns them into durable product capabilities. ## Relevant experience - TypeScript or JavaScript, React or a comparable frontend, backend services, SQL, queues, event-driven systems and third-party integrations. - High-throughput or reliability-sensitive systems, email infrastructure, developer tools, B2B SaaS, observability or workflow automation. - Startup, founding-engineer, product ownership, customer-facing engineering or small-team environments. - Production incident response, performance work, secure credential handling, CI/CD and incremental migrations. ## Quality bar Senior builders who investigate deeply, simplify decisively, communicate clearly and ship reliable outcomes. **Impact first. Title and pedigree second.**