Senior Software Developer

About Instead

Instead is a tax platform designed to help taxpayers and tax professionals collaborate to save money on taxes. As the first company in decades to receive IRS approvals to E-file 1040, 1041, 1120, 1120S, and 1065 — we're re-inventing a complex category. Founded in 2023, Instead combines LLMs with tax law to make tax management a continuous, proactive process rather than a dreaded annual deadline.

Instead's investors include Sarah Guo from Conviction (conviction.com), IRIS (irisglobal.com) the largest tax software provider in the UK and many of our partners and customers who believe in our mission and vision. The Instead team comprises talented leaders from leading tax, financial services and fintech companies — Gusto, Intuit, Zenefits, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer — as well as top tax & accounting firms such as PwC, BDO, RSM, and KPMG.

Instead was a 2024 Innovation Award Finalist in CPA Practice Advisor. Instead's CEO, Andrew Argue, is a CPA and has been named Top 100 Most Influential People in the Accounting Profession twice - Ones To Watch and CPA Practice Advisors 20 under 40.

About the role

In this role, you will get the chance to build innovative AI-powered tax software alongside a dynamic team. You'll work on both our customer-facing product Instead (instead.com) and our backend internal tooling that empowers our teams to build cutting-edge features. This role is at the forefront of leveraging AI to drive innovation across our platform, working on exciting high-value features for our customers. If you're passionate about working on real production use cases utilizing LLMs and want to contribute to groundbreaking AI applications in a fast-paced environment, you'll thrive as you help us drive innovation in tax technology.

Here is the tech you will get the chance to utilize

Front End: Vue, Nuxt, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS

Back End: Go, Docker on AWS ECS/Fargate, PostgreSQL on AWS RDS

AI: Cursor with Sonnet 3.5, Langchain, Helicone, Gemini, OpenAI's API utilizing 4o (still exploring best use cases for o1 pro) and any other piece of AI tech that we can get our hands on

What you'll do

Ship full-stack product features end to end for our live customer platform

Make key product improvements based on customer feedback and usage analytics

Understand and solve critical product bugs across the full stack

Build and integrate components for infrastructure, supporting production-level inference and advanced prompt engineering

Create tools and internal platforms to enhance the productivity and capabilities of Instead's teams

Additional projects as needed by the internal engineering team and US-based product teams

What you'll need

Proficiency in full-stack development, with a strong understanding of web frameworks, backend systems, and cloud infrastructure

Experience building backend systems and infrastructure that can support live products

3+ years of software development experience

High attention to detail

Fast learner who enjoys working in a fast-paced, innovative environment

Nice to have

A track record of working on full-stack projects, end-to-end

Experience with AI/ML frameworks and prompt engineering

Experience programming using AI copilots such as Cursor, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Windsurf, etc.

Experience with the technologies in our current stack

Experience building customer-facing products at scale

Why join us

Ability to work with cutting edge AI in all stages of the software development lifecycle

Work on a cutting-edge tax tech platform that's transforming the industry

Be part of a collaborative, mission-driven team

Competitive compensation and benefits

Growth opportunities in product development, compliance, and technology

Opportunity to work with cutting-edge AI technology in production environments

Equal Opportunity Employer - M/F/D/V

As a global business, we rely on diversity of culture and thought to deliver on our goals. To ensure we can do that, we seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations around the world regardless of race, color, sex/gender, including pregnancy, gender identity and expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, citizen status, veteran status, or any other protected classification under applicable law. We also make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law.

We trust our team with sensitive information, so all candidates who receive and accept employment offers must complete a background check before joining us.