Staff Software Engineer

About Instnt
Fraud is inevitable. Fraud loss isn’t.
At Instnt, we’re not just optimizing a legacy identity solution—we’re inventing a new insurance category. We are the first to seamlessly merge cutting-edge AI-powered identity fraud protection with AM Best A-rated insurance. The result? Our clients stop watching fraud eat their margins and shift the entire risk off their books with a fixed premium and a 30-day reimbursement guarantee.

The product is revolutionary, but the team is the engine of disruption. Our CEO, a proven serial entrepreneur behind multiple successful companies, including a unicorn, has built a leadership bench of seasoned experts. For you, this means working alongside industry leaders and builders who know how to scale intelligently. We’re at an inflection point—not merely growing, but leading the market.

The Role

We are looking for a senior, deeply hands-on full stack engineer and systems optimizer who can quickly get under the hood of a live production environment, assess the current architecture, and identify the highest-leverage opportunities to improve performance, scalability, and engineering efficiency. This is not a role for someone who wants clean greenfield work only. We need an experienced builder who is energized by improving systems, tackling technical debt, scaling, and troubleshooting production issues, and knows how to turn ambiguity into a clear path forward.

You will be tasked with helping us audit current system,  develop a clear point of view on architectural opportunities, workflow bottlenecks, and technical debt, and then work with the team to  establish a thoughtful execution plan that prioritizes the most critical roadmap and platform initiatives in the right sequence. You will work closely with contractors, breaking large projects into clear workstreams, delegating specific execution where needed, while still remaining the technical owner who can jump into the code, unblock progress, and ensure the right long-term decisions are being made.

This role is ideal for someone who loves going from system assessment → prioritization → hands-on optimization → long-term hardening and scale.

New York City: $180,000 to $220,000

What You’ll Do

• Conduct a technical audit of the current platform, including frontend, backend, infrastructure, workflows, performance, and reliability risks.
• Assess the existing stack and identify the highest-impact opportunities to improve scalability, reliability, latency, and developer velocity across the platform.
• Create a clear and pragmatic execution roadmap, sequencing what should be tackled first, second, and third across architecture, workflows, and product-critical initiatives.
• Remain deeply hands-on in coding, refactoring, and optimization work across frontend, backend, APIs, databases, and infrastructure layers.
• Partner closely with product and data science to translate business, model, and customer requirements into elegant production systems.
• Advise on pragmatic architectural decisions that balance startup speed with long-term scalability.
• Raise the engineering bar through strong code quality, thoughtful reviews, and hands-on mentorship of engineers and contractors.
• Leverage AI-powered development tools and modern engineering workflows to increase speed and quality.

Who You Are

• You are at your best when stepping into complex systems and quickly developing clarity on where optimization, simplification, and architectural improvements will have the greatest impact.
• You have significant experience performing technical audits, architecture reviews, production debugging, and system remediation in startup or high-growth environments.
• You are deeply hands-on and still love coding. You are excited to personally fix issues, improve architecture, and stabilize systems before scaling them.
• You know how to direct contractors and external engineers with precision, translating broad technical problems into clearly scoped execution tasks.
• You are highly fluent in Python and AWS cloud-native architectures. Familiarity with React, TypeScript, and SQL is a plus.
• You have strong judgment around what needs an immediate tactical fix versus what needs a deeper architectural rebuild.
• You thrive in startup ambiguity, move fast, and don’t need perfect documentation to figure out how things work.
• Bonus points: experience in FinTech, KYC, fraud systems, onboarding workflows, workflow tooling, or real-time SaaS platforms.